MEASUREMENTS: MQA Filters on Mytek Brooklyn & Thoughts on USB Doohickeys

Hey folks... It's summer and I'm in and out of town doing a bit of R&R mixed with the day job.

I sent my friend with the Mytek Brooklyn and Fireface ADC a package of the MQA "Render" tagged files for testing. As you can see above, that's what the MQA filters look like with the Mytek Brooklyn serving as "Renderer" for the impulse responses. If you look at the top row, we see that the Brooklyn's standard digital filter at 24/96 is the same as what MQA uses for playing back 96kHz "original" unfolded PCM. This is different from the Dragonfly Black DAC presented a couple weeks back where the standard filter at 24/96 is a much sharper one and would shift to the weaker MQA filter only when it detects the MQA Render tagged data.

COMPARISON: Hardware-Decoded MQA (using Mytek Brooklyn DAC)

As promised in my last blog post about software MQA decoding, I have been wanting to have a peek and listen to hardware decoding. Due to the proprietary nature of the MQA firmware as well as the fact that we don't have access to MQA encoder software, there is only so much we can do to explore the effect on an audio signal. Ideally, encoding a test signal and then decoding would be the best way to explore the effects and limits of how this all works...

I don't have an MQA-capable DAC myself (and honestly owning one is not high on my list of priorities), but a friend does happen to have the Mytek Brooklyn which is fully MQA-native and has the ability to decode all the way to 24/384. Furthermore, he has the use of a professional ADC of fantastic quality - the RME Fireface to make some recordings of the output from the DAC.

Image from Mytek. Obviously very capable DAC!

With the combination of the excellent DAC and ADC, we should be able to examine the output and make some comparisons. The main questions being:

1. Can we show that hardware-decoded MQA is closer to an original signal beyond the 88/96kHz decoding already done in software?

2. Can we compare the hardware decoder with the output from the software decoder? How much difference is there between the two?