jamjar784
Heavy Up
Yes is seems messy and it is not cleare what is required.
I got a mail from Tidal saying that you can play MQA only from the desktop App.
On the Roon forum those that have DACs that have official MQA support can play MQA tracks from Tidal with Roon because Roon will simply send the stream untouched to the DAC.
So apparently you do not need special hardware to decode MQA this can be done in software which I suspected all the time. But marketing imply that you need special hardware.
So I will only try MQA if Roon is allowed to make the decoding on the server so it will work with any DAC.
It seems the MQA dudes have changed their tune (from last year) and you can decode MQA in Tidal by software and play to any DAC, so need for anything built into MDAC/MDAC2/FDAC. More info in the CES reports, pfm thread and CA. Roon 1.3 plans to offer same. So MQA will be able to make their money from streaming and no need to license 'compatible' hardware. Maybe later they will reveal what science is behind it. Current opinion from those who've heard comparable tracks is DSD > MQA > CD. No flames pls , YMMV