No longer MQA when using TIDAL

It’s a bit confusing, but it’s not really MP3. It’s still MQA, but the net module is reporting the container as MPEG, which MusicLife then happily displays as MP3. I’d say 9/10 times, the container is correctly reported as FLAC (with MQA inside), but every now and again the module reports MPEG. I don’t know why. I think I put a workaround in MusicLife beta, but it may be in the ‘show more info’ update that isn’t available yet.

1.62/1027 is the last public release, which doesn’t support the ‘new’ MQA introspection method. If you are on the beta forum group, any of the betas there do support the new method. If you’re not in that group, let me know and I can ask the forum admin to invite you.

I’d love to take credit for the long press, but thats actually a new iOS feature. All I did was add the back button titles so the little context menu wasn’t completly blank. The good thing though is you can now use that shortcut for any app.

I did try to join the beta forum group for amp updates but I guess it was full, so if you can ask them to invite me I would be happy.

Hi @Arnjo you’ve been added. Head on over to the beta forum to get the latest firmware.

As an owner of an avr20 I know I am not in the right group but I have the same problem playing mqa files.

Hi @arcam_paul, so are we saying here that the issues over Tidal MQA files (96-192kHz) not ‘appearing’ to be played on the SA30 whilst everything seems OK in the musiclife app, can be resolved by downloading various updates on firmware? If so, could you please advise me (us) how to go about doing this. Many thanks

This is a really irritating bug. I hope it’s going to be fixed soon. MQA works with roon but I think the sound is much better when streaming over an Upnp app so I’m on my way to change my streaming service over to Audirvana. But Audirvana doesn’t recognise my SA30 as an MQA Dac anymore…
@arcam_paul I’m also interested in some firmware that’s enabling MQA.

Audirvana has never recognized my SA30 as a MQA Dac…

But when you manually set your SA30 as an MQA Dac in Audirvana, surely your SA30 has interpreted the files as MQA when you streamed that format before this bug?

No, I tried everything and even asked Damien about the problem, but he blamed the problem on Arcam. But the sa 30 recognizes mqa with Roon and MusicLife. I think the problem lies with Audirvana. If you can get Audirvana to work properly with the sa30 please let me know! Thanks!

Ken

@Ken Correction. Problem also exists with Musiclife. The SA30 does not recognise MQA files played through Musiclife.

It is not only musiclife that is affected by this bug. Mconnect which is another upnp player played MQA files without any problems to my SA30 until a few weeks ago.

@MFT and @Johan_K - you’ve been added to the beta firmware group. The latest release may be found at the top. Please keep discussion around these builds to that private group, so we have a chance to address issues before we create a public build.

@Heieno - the AVR is affected by this too. We are currently testing a new build for this internally, but we’re not quite ready to share this yet. There are a couple of issues blocking us from release, but hopefully these can be resolved quickly.

It’s important to state that this change isn’t only affecting us, there are a couple of other manufacturers in the same boat. Thankfully though, the work to support this new method of MQA identifying is done, we just need to clear another couple of issues to release publicly. Thanks for your patience.

Could you please add me too in firmware beta group? I’m still under alot of stress due to this mqa issue…

I hope this includes new firmware for Arcam ST 60 ?

@Kris you’ve been added now.

@Trogge it does, yes.

When kan we expect the new firmware to ST60.

i am about to cancel my Tidal account and migrate to qobuz over this issue.

I believe we are aiming for the beginning of July.

Can you notify here when the new firmware is up?

Of course :slight_smile: I’ll set a reminder.

@trogge I’ve just spoke to Engineering, they informed me that there was a public release yesterday for ST60, which should fix the MQA decoding issue. You can check for updates from your unit, by following the instructions in the v1164 release notes.

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