Aurender A10 music server has internal MQA DAC

[audio bill]

Originally Posted by richardallred

Does that mean to get the benefit of the first unfolding, we should connect the laptop straight to DAC?

The problem with that is there would be trade-offs involved... If you connected your laptop directly to your DAC via USB, using the desktop Tidal app or other software which provides MQA Core decoding you would benefit from getting the first unfold higher resolution data to your DAC. You would however then be sacrificing the lower noise and higher quality server performance which the Aurender N10 provides compared to most PCs. The only way to know which would be better is to compare them in your specific setup. Hopefully in time Aurender will add MQA Core decoding to make it even more competitive in the marketplace and then you'll have the best of both worlds.