Turning MQA off Tidal

@ejr1953 now go to your dac settings in roon and turn off mqa core decoder. Now go and play the same mqa album with it off. You will get a higher resolution file without any unfolding done by the computer. Sounds better than mqa on my device, and definetly sounds better than normal CD quality. Just not sure what is happening. I had an app on my phone once that showed all mqa albums as hi-res audio formats, since mobile didnt support mqa at the time. This has all since been changed, but leads me to believe regular hi-res files are possible through tidal without the need for MQA.

I have a PS Audio DirectStream DAC, which like your Chord, doesn't do MQA, and as well use Roon (on their Nucleus Plus streaming server).

A while back, probably a few prior versions of the Roon core back, when I'd play an MQA tune and have Roon do the first unfold, most of the results were "dull" sounding, but lately that's not the case.  Lately, when I play an MQA file, with Roon doing the unfolding, the resulting sound quality is as good, if not better than the CD version of the same album on Tidal.

I suspect the techies at Roon have some "special sauce" they've added to the Roon Core...