[doggiehowser]

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.