dCS Rolling Out MQA Technology Support

British high-end hi-fi brand dCS has updated its product range with MQA technology, and owners can update their firmware via the internet download and update functionality.

For those out of the loop, MQA is basically an efficient method of encoding and transmitting high-resolution music. The technology digitally packages the content as a file that is small enough to stream, without the sonic sacrifices that compressed file formats have to make.

This convenience is the reason why adoption of the MQA standard is picking up in the industry.

MQA founder Bob Stuart spoke on this occasion:

“The MQA and dCS teams were able to work together to develop code which accurately matched the MQA hierarchical ideal reconstruction to analogue. This MQA implementation is unique, as it is the first opportunity to enable a DAC which, by providing exact rendering to beyond 16x (768 kHz), matches the desired temporal response with very low modulation noise.”

And although an MQA decoder and renderer built into products is not exactly necessary to play the encoded stream, having these two in helps to specifically match and optimize the output according to the integrated DAC.

That said, the MQA packaging is very much bespoke in dCS hardware, and that’s because the company does not use IC converters in its DACs.

dCS will roll out update for its range of four digital components, namely Rossini, Vivaldi, Debussy and Network Bridge. The firmware for the first of these is already available, while Vivaldi and Network Bridge owners will have access to it soon, sometimes this month.

No word yet on when the Debussy update will be up for grab.