Understanding MQA/tidal/ DA conversion

Absolutely.  Forget Tidal/MQA and subscribe to QoBuz.   It offers hi-res albums and more than 1,700 playlists.  

appreciate the suggestion, my constraint is we have a TIDAL family plan so we're all paying $30 a piece for the full year, so will have this for at least the next year or more as I'm the only one who cares about the HIFI component, the rest just like the service.

So with the QOBUZ piece though, would the Oppo (or any streamer) output a high rez signal directly to the DAC?  I have tried but don't fully understand how it all comes together.  I need Digital Audio for Dummies....

I stream QoBuz hi-res albums (24/96 and 24/192) from my Aurender music server to my DAC.  It works perfectly and sounds great.  

No problem with Qobuz but I have tried Tidal MQA and with many recordings it sounds great, really great. But not all MQA recordings sound great. And as others have mentioned you must have a DAC to fully unfold the MQA file. That's kind of a pain. I have a Bluesound Node and Vault which are MQA compliant. I don't know if Oppos are MQA capable, but it should be easy to find out.

I have both TIdal and Quboz. They do not have the same albums so having both is worthwhile.

I did quite a bit of listening to MQA and don’t find it’s worthwhile, overall, but I like Tidal’s record collection. On my DAC there’s no way to use it with my preferred filter so I leave it off, but Roon does some of this.

As has been written elsewhere, while MQA may claim to be high resolution, it’s also lossy. See the Benchmark Media paper on it. In a world where 100mBit+ speeds is normal for audiophiles it makes MQA compression less important.

I'm also lucky enough to use Roon which will do 96/24 bit MQA decompression in software so I don't really think much about the whole process.