DCS Introduces Customized Solution to Incorporate MQA in Its DACs

High-end audio company dCS announced a customized solution for incorporating MQA (Master Quality Authenticated) in its digital to analog converters (DACs), said the company Wednesday. Conventional MQA decoders include a renderer that’s customized for built-in DACs, but dCS reconstructs analog music from the digital stream using specific software and discrete hardware, it said. The solution is modeled on music reconstruction that uses oversampling, filtering and high-speed conversion, it said. Teams from dCS and MQA were in discussion, development and testing of the solution for nearly a year, said David Steven, managing director, dCS. MQA Chief Technology Officer Bob Stuart called the implementation “unique,” and one that provides “exact rendering to beyond 16x (768 kHz),” matching the desired temporal response “with very low modulation noise.” The solution will be available via a software update for owners of the dCS Rossini, Vivaldi One, Network Bridge and Upsampler, said dCS.