How to rip a MQA CD to enjoy Hi-res music

[tomjax]

Re: How to rip a MQA CD to enjoy Hi-res music

Hi, Ok, I have done some digging on the internet, because I had the exact same issue. I was ripping the Queen album "The Game" (MQA-UHQCD from CD Japan) and all but the first track ripped to flac as MQA, but the first track just remained at standard CD 44.1Khz on my Pioneer XDP-100R player. I tried many of the DBpoweramp DSP settings. Even uncompressed, but no luck. Going back to first principles I managed to find details on the MQA encoding standard. The requirement states that there are two parts to MQA playback. To 100% comply (not mandatory) with the MQA standard you must have .mqa.flac or .mqa.alac in the filename. For example my offending Queen track was "Play The Game.flac" when I first ripped it. I then changed the name to "Play The Game.mqa.flac" and my Pioneer MQA player recognised the file and reports it playing back at 88.2Khz. This got me thinking, so I looked at my other tracks from the same ripped CD which still had the default ripped .flac extension in the filename. Although my Pioneer player reported the blue light and the signatory "MQA" logo to show the track was indeed MQA, looking at the quality, it was still playing at 44.1Khz!!!! I then renamed my other music tracks to the .mqa.flac requirement et voila! All my tracks now fully play at 88.2Khz. I have seen several posts on the internet trying to resolve the playback issue of MQA coded flac files, so hopefully this resolves the problem for folks on this thread.

Great, I was struggling to get UHQCD ripped as well, but this fixed it and they now stream to my DAC (Audioquest Cobalt) as a .MQA file. I really appreciate you posting this and helping solve the frustration with getting them these CDs unpacked to MQA format.