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I am no longer getting MQA?

I notice that with my Auralic Aries G2.1 streamer that I no longer get MQA. I now get flac 48KHZ 24 bit at the most where I used to get MQA. The sound is still good but it is not MQA. I know that there was a problem with Tidal and many streaming devices with regards to no more MQA. Does anyone know what the issue is and am I now only going to get flac 48KHZ 24 bit where I used to get MQA or at least Auralic’s version of MQA? 
128x128mitchb
abd1
156 posts
 
I have an Auralic G1 streaming to a Berkeley Alpha Reference DAC with MQA. I also noticed that MQA doesn’t show up when streaming from the lightning app even though the track is MQA. I have MQA set in the Tidal streaming settings in the software. It used to show MQA but no longer. 
mitchb's avatar
mitchb OP
336 posts
 

My Auralic Aries G2.1 streamer sounds good with my PS Audio Directstream dac but it no longer decodes MQA. The sound is good and I find the setting for MQA/FLAC on my Aries sounds the best. My Directstream dac will play the upsamles but it sounds best at 48KHZ 24 bit.

ebkesq
17 posts
 

Auralic removed MQA support from its firmware quite a while ago.

ebkesq
17 posts
 

As of version 8.0, there is no more MQA support.  (The current firmware version is 8.5):

 

ebkesq
17 posts
 

This was done because Tidal changed the way it implemented MQA tagging.  If you still wish to use Auralic’s proprietary MQA decoding method, there is a way to do it but it must be turned on manually.  Here is the email I received from Auralic describing the process:

 

Kelly Scheidt (AURALIC LIMITED) 

Mar 11, 2022, 8:36 PST 

Hello Eric, 

Thank you for contacting AURALiC. 

To answer your questions, our products have never been able to decode or render MQA content. However, our streamer line, ARIES, is able to passthrough MQA content to a MQA certified DACs, should you own one. 

Our outdated feature "simulating" MQA was removed due to MQA changing how the files were tagged through Tidal. If you want to bring this simulated MQA back, simply engage your resampler and upsample to your preference and engage the smooth filter. That is all the previous feature was doing, it now just has to be done manually. 

Kind Regards,

Kelly Scheidt
Tech. Support Manager
AURALiC North America

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