Devialet and MQA

[David A]

MQA on Tidal is increasingly becoming more and more available. 
To fully exploit it would be nice if Devialet could include fully encoding in the DAC as well as DSD.
Any idea how much effort / feasible this would be?

I seem to remember reading something, possibly a comment from one of the Devialet people quoted in one of the Munich show or Oxford Audio event threads, that implementing MQA processing would adversely affect the DAC/ADH processes in the Devialet so my guess is that it isn't likely to happen, or at least not with the current Expert Pro models. It may be more feasible in a new model specifically designed with MQA processing in mind.

There are 2 steps in MQA processing, what MQA calls the first and second unfolds. The first can be done in software so it could be a candidate for inclusion in Devialet firmware BUT the first unfold can already be done in Roon and Devialet already has an association with Roon that it promotes, and it can also be done in some external devices. Even if it were possible to easily include the first unfold in Devialet software I doubt Devialet would see much benefit in adding the first MQA unfold to their list of features. It's a lot easier and cheaper to promote Roon as the way for Devialet owners to access the first unfold. The second unfold can only be done in hardware so we aren't going to see that in any current model Devialet and I doubt we'll see it in a future model

I also don't think native DSD handling is possible with the current DAC.