Berkeley MQA models are MQA renderers, not MQA full decoders. So it needs one of the (hardware or software) MQA Core decoders mentioned earlier.
While different people may have different interpretation of what exactly a hardware MQA decoder is, I define it as a hardware product that contains MQA core decoding and/or rendering, unlike a software product such as Tidal desktop app, Roon and Audirvana. Under this definition, N-01 and MSB (with appropriate options) are hardware MQA products.
It is true that many MQA products support MQA decoding only via some inputs but not others. In N-01, NT-505 and DirectStream with Bridge II, the MQA decoding is done in the network board, so only network input (or USB storage for N-01 or NT-505) supports MQA but not USB or other inputs.
In Rossini its network input supports full MQA decoding, but USB or SPDIF inputs support MQA rendering only. In Vivaldi the Upsampler supports MQA Core decoding while the DAC supports MQA rendering.
Last edited by wklie; 03-26-2019 at 01:13 PM.
|