Hi guys, I am the proud new owner of a Vivaldi DAC and Upsampler. Everyting is great so far but I’d like to confirm the MQA capabilities of this combo.
Based on the documentation I understand that the Upsampler does not support MQA decoding on the USB input from a PC but does on the network interface. Is this correct?
Playing Tidal via Mosaic MQA works as expected. But if I play Tidal via Audirvana on my PC over DLNA to the Upsampler I’m having a problem. If I configure the DAC as an MQA Renderer in Audirvana, I see 24/192->MQA on the Updsampler as expected. However if I configure the DAC as an MQA Decoder, I get only 24/48->DSDx2.
The upsampler should be able to handle the decoding right? Any idea what might be wrong?
Hey Jeff, congrats and welcome to the platform! I was wondering what you would decide. I don’t listen to much MQA, and I just let my Tidal subscription lapse, so I’ve got no easy way to help diagnose. I’m sure Pete or someone will chime in.
The mechanism used by Audirvana (and any other non-Mosaic / non-Roon streaming source or control point) is provided for compatibility only and only has a very limited feature set. MQA decoding is not (and will not ever be) supported via this mechanism.
For the network input MQA decoding is only supported with Mosaic and Roon.
If you want to use Audirvana for playback then set the Upsampler as an MQA renderer in Audirvana and let Audirvana do the decoding. The Upsampler will pass this stream through untouched and the DAC will perform the rendering stage.