USB Audio Player Pro with Hilidac Beam 2

[jaymen]

Hi team,
I bought the Hilidac Beam 2 as it was presented as a  FULL MQA decoder + renderer.
When I connect it to my phone (Samsung Note 10 plus) seems that USB Audi Player Pro is doing the MQA unfolding as I can see MQA tracks move up to 88 or 96khz with a blue or green LED lit up. My question is why doesn't the below happen for my DAC:

When a DAC is detected that implements an MQA decoder (for example, the Meridian Explorer 2 or the DAC inside certain LG models), the MQA decoder inside USB Audio Player PRO is deactivated and MQA decoding is performed by the hardware. No green or blue led will be displayed in the app in this situation.

The reason I am asking is because I see some files in Tidal are 192khz but only gets moved up to a max of 96khz. Was wondering why my hardware DAC is not doing further unfolds.

Hope you can assist me with this

[dwrae]

Because the Hilidac is a MQA renderer, not a decoder. The Hilidac does the rendering, but since the app cannot know to which samplerate, it shows the sample rate of the first unfold.

[Sixof1]

Because the Hilidac is a MQA renderer, not a decoder. The Hilidac does the rendering, but since the app cannot know to which samplerate, it shows the sample rate of the first unfold.

With the Tidal app on Android (10) and Tidal Desktop, the Beam 2SE renders MQA, as shown by the magenta light on the unit, yet with UAPP and Tidal MQA, no magenta light shows, indicating that rendering is not active. Furthermore (not UAPP's problem) I note that with Tidal app on Android (not desktop) all songs (not just MQA) now drop out frequently and there are constant annoying clicks. This tends to show that android is at fault, not the Beam. If UAPP would allow the Beam 2SE to render MQA, it would be perfect. Any suggestions as to how one would get the second unfold on UAPP?

[dwrae]

The offiical Tidal app uses the Android driver which cannot output bit-perfect, but upsamples everything to the highest rate of the DAC, which is 96kHz. If it's anything like the the Dragonfly's, the colors for 96kHz and MQA are very close to each other.

In order for the Hilidac to do MQA rendering, you need to buy the MQA decoder inside UAPP (if not already done) and enable bit-perfect. When the app is decoding MQA, you will see that by a blue/green led next to the MQA symbol and an output sample rate of 88.2/96kHz.