I was afraid this would happen! The iFi iDSD Black Label ($199) is not only keeping up with the 5x more expensive Wyred4Sound DAC-1LE it’s besting it in regular decoding AIFF, FLAC DSD, etc, not by a huge margin but enough that I find myself listening to it more than the Wyred4Sound PLUS I get MQA decoding which I’m finding alarmingly good.
I’m listening to Getz/Gilberto released with MQA on Tidal. I’ve listened to this album at leas 30-40 times and hear some of the mic ambience and other low level detail not heard with regular DSD 128.
I am a little annoyed I had to update the firmware but on Mac it was a snap. I am running Roon software on my Mac Mini which does the “first unfold” of MQA. I’d use Roon even if it didn’t but it made getting a high performance, low cost DAC VERY easy!
@Prime Minister , your post pushed me over the edge to give MQA one more try, thank you.