I am no longer getting MQA?

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.

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

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

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Our outdated feature "simulating" MQA was removed due to MQA changing how the files were tagged through Tidal.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

Please join our online community of streaming enthusiasts at community.auralic.com for further troubleshooting tips, performance tweaks and more!

Why bother knocking Qobuz or MQA when you can have both? I mean the cost of the subscriptions is nothing to what people here pay for their audio systems. It seems childish to bicker about what is good and what isn’t?