Streamer MQA Question

I settled on doing the innuos pulse mini (should be here in a week or so) with output over usb to an r2r dac for some types of music, and a toslink (24/192) to a delta sigma dac for other types of music (loud rock, aka AC/DC). Both dacs do full mqa unfold..  More instrumental through r2r..

I can feed the pulse mini from qobuz/tidal/NAS..

I didn’t go with Aurender simply due to my laziness where I would have to move the usb between dacs..

Sounds doable, yes.

nevada_matt,

May I ask which dacs you’re using?

 

I was wondering if in order to stream TIDAL (which I have a sub to) do both the Streamer AND the DAC need to be MQA compatible/capable?

Just to answer the original question. No - you don’t need to use MQA through tidal you can happily stream music at lower resolution, which is still better than CD. 

The SMSL-9 streamer fully unfolds MQA, and I’m using it to do the MQA unfolding to feed a Musician Pegasus DAC. This streamer is a major steal and should be on your list to consider. Here is a quote from SMSL.

Full MQA Support:-

S.M.S.L SD-9 brings you the support for high-tech MQA files. MQA is the latest technology where high-resolution data is folded into the empty bitrate spaces on the files. This technology enables the writing of high-resolution files while keeping the file size small, suitable for streaming and storing locally. Only MQA certified devices are capable of unfolding these files and bringing the true output to their users. SD-9 is one of these devices, it fully unfolds the MQA recordings and brings a truly immersive experience for its users.