MQA?

Data points are always good.
The unfolding however, is reputed to be much more than filtering.  Its proprietary so we cannot say for sure, but they claim that additional resolution and time coherency are restored. This is why i used the terms "coding vs playback". Its vague, but so is Bob on this point. It's his secret sauce.

(specifically i wrote: Let’s put aside the real discussion which is the basic merits of MQA, and accept it for what it claims to be; an improvement in digital coding ("better HD"). Not playback mind you, coding.)
And no, i did not read your later comments at the time, never got that far, and thanks for the pointer.

G

Here is a 'How It Works' Overview from MQA:

https://www.mqa.co.uk/how-it-works

A Steve Guttenberg interview with a Tidal Representative on MQA:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhOMkOB7lTs

An early 'primer' from Michael Lavorgna:

https://www.audiostream.com/content/mqa-decoding-explained

I was first respondent here and mentioned I could hear major mqa positive difference on my reference system but not on my two secondary systems.

For context, those systems are:

Reference: Teac NT-505 (AK4493) -> MIT matrix 6 XLR balanced IC -> Audio Research DSI200 integrated amp ->MIT matrix 12 speaker cable -> Spendor D7, REL S5; Audio Art power cables. Here, MAJOR sonic MQA improvement streaming Tidal vs regular flac Tidal stream over cat7 Ethernet.

Second: Integra DTM-7 (AK4438) -> MIT Terminator 4 speaker cable -> Spendor SA1, Sunfire SDS8; WAudio power cables. Here, extremely marginal if any noticeable sonic improvement steaming mqa Tidal vs flac Tidal over WiFi.

Third: Bluesound Powernode 2 (Burr Brown 5122) -> AmazonBasics speaker cable -> NHT C-1. WAudio power cable. Here, extremely marginal if any noticeable sonic improvement steaming mqa Tidal vs flac Tidal over cat7 Ethernet cable.

So that gives hopefully some context to my “rest of system” comment. My two secondary setups are pretty modest but the source for each fully supports mqa so I can make the comparisons.

@kren0006 curious if you had the TEAC before the firmware update for MQA? Did network player have the software for MQA already and the firmware just updated the DAC?

It would be interesting if say, only the streaming side of things was MQA complaint but your DAC wasn’t if there would be a difference in sound quality. That's the point of debate right now.

However, that seems like a really nice DAC.

Hey, sorry I don’t know answer to that question re Teac dac.

i got mine and ran it awhile without the firmware update but wasn’t really focused on the question at hand, more really was just fumbling trying to get the fw updated (doing so not as easy with most modern hardware). But yeah, I really like it.