DAC’s and Streamers
 

Can someone help me understand/wrap my head around something I don’t understand.

I just purchased a Schiit yggy which will be here sometime this week. I’m also looking at adding a Auralic G1. I’m having troubles understanding which unit is doing what tasks. I DO understand the yggy is doung the digital to analog conversion but what I don’t understand is what the G1 is doing. Is it decoding files internally before sending them to the DAC? I have read that the yggy does’t unfold MQA but I also read on the Auralic website where it says it’s software will unfold MQA??? So who’s doing what??

A DAC like the Yggy does one thing - convert an established known I2S SPDIF or USB or AES protocol of digital audio streams into an analog signal which your amplifier can accept.

A streamer is more or less like a computer in the wild Wild West of computer audio.

Computer audio accepts a variety of audio formats which can be WAV AIFF FLAC AAC MP3 and even from YouTube etc.

You first have to read or stream these files from somewhere - a network drive, a computer or even the internet (streaming services like TIDAL, Spotify, Apple Music etc)

Next step the file format has to be decoded into a digital audio stream that the DAC can understand (I2S USB SPDIF AES etc)

Then that stream is sent to the DAC.

MQA is a way of folding (lossy) high resolution audio into a 16/44 PCM stream.

When you send the unadulterated 16/44 stream to a non MQA DAC, the DAC sees the 16/44 and decodes it as 16/44

The same unadulterated stream sent to an MQA DAC triggers an MQA flag internally which performs the two stages: unfolding (to 24/96) and decoding (filtering applied) to up to 24/192 (or higher but AFAIK it is only up to 192 today)

MQA relaxed the MQA enforcement about a year ago so that some software today can perform the first stage (unfold to 24/96) and send that to a non MQA DAC like the yggy. That’s what your Auralic is doing. It’s not the full MQA experience but it is pretty close considering most MQA files on TIDAL is only 24/96 or 24/44 or 24/48.

Hope this helps.

doggiehowser.......:goodpost:

Thanks for the excellent post, I’m going to have to re-read it a few times to understand.

If I recall, Schiit used to state that they didn’t play nice with MQA..but maybe now with the relaxed enforcement and the streaming device performing the first stage they kind of are?

rushca01.......From Auralic's website: The ARIES G1 connects over Wi-Fi to digital sources like network attached storage, Internet streaming services like TIDAL and Qobuz, Internet Radio, and USB drives to bring high performance streaming to your home audio system.

With the Auralic G1 you will still need music file sources connected to you G1 by either an Ethernet cable from your router, or by WiFi connectivity to your router. You will also have the option of connecting a hard drive via USB to the G1 and/or a NAS (network attached strorage). Then your Auralic G1 will feed a digital signal via a high quality coaxial or AES/EBU cable to the Yggdrasil DAC.

rushca01.......There is absolutely no MQA decoding going on in the Yggdrasil DAC. Most often the first "unfold" of the MQA decoding is being done by the streaming service you are using. In that case the Yggdrasil will play the higher bit rate and resolution that ia provided in the digital stream, but provides no additional level of MQA decoding. There is no MQA decoding going on inside the Auralic G1, either.

Right, in my case it will be a streaming service such as spotify or tidal.

This is where I get confused:

https://support.auralic.com/hc/en-us...eaming-device-

rushca01.......Again, quoting from Auralic's wesite: AURALiC streaming products, and the underlying network architecture that serves as the foundation for several of our unique streaming features and, ultimately, the sound quality they are able to achieve, rely on the ability to employ several of those very processing techniques. Without the freedom to develop new algorithms for artfully rendering digital music, we feel an artificial limit would be placed on our relentless pursuit of the best sound quality that is technically possible by sacrificing those techniques in favor of MQA support.

These are a few of the significant factors that were vigorously scrutinized in ultimately making the decision not to pursue support for MQA at the present time. If and when MQA Ltd. makes changes to the emerging MQA format that may be more consistent with our own development of signal processing techniques and technologies, we will of course re-evaluate this position with the hope that music lovers everywhere can benefit from continued research and valuable partnerships in the audio industry.

DAC’s and Streamers
 

Your G1 does do something like the first “unfolding” of MQA files, but it’s not true MQA. Auralic has stated they do not plan to support MQA.
If you follow the instructions to the setup pages in the Lightning app, you’ll see this:

“Decoding Method: AURALiC streaming devices are capable of decoding MQA files using AURALiC’s proprietary resampling and de-blurring method. You can select from the sampling rate settings for the process described here. Please note that this process is not an MQA-created or MQA-licensed process.”

If you prefer not to use Auralic’s system, there is a passthrough option on the same page that will let an MQA file pass through to your Yggy undisturbed.

In further research, I watched a youtube video where a reviewer stated that the Arualic G1 has a Cortex A9 processor, this would be same processor as the Node2..

Has anyone A/B these two into the same DAC? I wonder how much difference there is?