plexamp and MQA FLAC on node

Answered
Ruperto

Hello all,

I've recently purchased a node and combined with my Tidal subscription I'm loving the sounds of both my MQA and HIFI albums.

i'm also a long time plex and plexamp user, which through library and mood radios provides some wonderful and nostalgic gems from my local collection.

I've also been adding some MQA content locally.

Now while the bluesound sounds lovely, there are big differences in the interaction with my library when using plexamp than when accessing through blueos controller.

Ideally I would like to merge these capabilities, something akin to the tidal connect option which works quite well, however from reading various posts I get the impression

there is not a lot of communication between the companies and joint solutions are unlikely to come.

I was thinking that the most likely way to use plexamp through the node is to take an optical in signal through the toslink. I've seen the settings in custom sources and enabled the passthrough there.

Longer term i've been looking at a hifiberry RPi hat which has hifiberryOS and which some users have had success deploying headless plexamp to a RPi to get access to the plexamp playlists and outputting MQA/FLAC through optical for unfolding on the node.

I've done a little testing and have plexamp playing through my mac, into the optical port using an old creative extigy sound card which is 24/96bit capable and has optical out. The sound seems good, but its raised a few questions for me and i thought i should ask here before spending more time and money on something which may be unachievable.

I notice that in bluos controller there is no indication when I'm playing MQA content through plex or plexamp. I make the distinction as plex itself seems to have more passthrough options too which may be the source of the problem

so some questions

1) when using optical, will i see any quality indicator. The panel appears quite bare when the controller is set to optical in, no track information etc, so should i see if there is MQA processing happening?

2) has anyone tried something similar? there are a few potential points of failure here. is Plexamp (or plex) sending pure FLAC with the high bitrate MQA encoding to the sound device, is the old device interfering too? I note that the hifiberry states the output is 'bit perfect' and I think the extigy was EOL before MQA was invented...  Keen to see if anyone in the community has tried this before investing in a hifiberry.

3) is there another way to try more tests without investing further? does anything else play MQA I could push to the node via optical to see if I can get the MQA status listed - i.e. if plex's signal is the problem.

for what its worth it sounds good, i think its a good solution for this extended library radio when you want to play music from across the collection, i would just like it to also play MQA if the file has the information coded within it...

thanks for reading!

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Comments

3 comments

Date Votes
  • Official comment
    Tony W.
    Product Support Manager

    Your third-party streaming software does not support MQA. Please see www.mqa.co.uk for more details. If you wish to have true MQA playback, please continue to use the TIDAL, Radio Paradise, NUGS.net, or other MQA-provided content in the BluOS App.

  • Ruperto

    Hi Tony, thanks for the response. If a 'bit perfect' FLAC is supplied to the NODE will it not decode the MQA itself then? Or it must always have the first unfold done by software?

    Its interesting, I've tried putting Tidal through the Optical cable from my laptop to the node and it still doesn't show the MQA symbol in BluOS controller. The UI doesn't seem to have any data (Music quality, name, artist etc) in the bottom panel, which makes sense as the data is coming through the optical. Is that correct that even when Tidal is supplying MQA content over optical - with Passthrough both on and off - no MQA symbol is displayed - or does it mean there is a problem with the optical signal itself?

     

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  • Tony W.
    Product Support Manager

    MQA is all or nothing meaning to hear the full MQA experience, every link in the audio chain must be MQA compliant. 

    1

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