I just bought myself a Dragonfly Red DAC for my Audioquest Nighthawk headphones and am struggling a bit to config this setup properly. I disabled all system enhancements in the sound config as per Audioquest's instructions and set the sample rate to 96kHz as I most often listen to Master tracks on Tidal. Yet, despite doing all this, I feel like I must be missing something cause the sound is only marginally better than it was when plugged straight into the motherboard and comparable (or even worse to my ear) than when plugged straight into my Macbook Air. I'm really surprised by this cause I expected something great and so far it's.. well.. debatable. I've tried both the USB 2.0 and 3.0 port but with little difference. So I have a few questions to make sure I'm not missing something:
1. The purple (MQA) colour only appears when Tidal is in exclusive mode. Is there really no way to have it work with MQA without this? I use my headphones for like 8 hours a day and it is just unacceptable to me to have to close the Tidal app before listening to a 1-minute clip on YouTube or something, only to then fire up Tidal again...
2. I saw the instructions recommend to turn the force volume option but this just results in the headphones blasting something like 50 on the system scale (+100 on the Tidal knob because this maxes it by default) at me on every song which is way too loud. If I crank it down, it'll blast something around 50 at me on the next song anyway. Am I losing quality by disabling the volume force?
3. Should I enable passthrough MQA in Tidal's settings for the DFR? I saw online posts claiming you should do that as DFR handles it through its hardware but in my case, this just resulted in the light going from purple (MQA) to magenta (96kHz) immediately.
4. Should I install/configure something more in Windows settings or is the quality I'm getting now how it's going to stay?
Thanks a lot in advance for help and clarification!
1. The purple (MQA) colour only appears when Tidal is in exclusive mode. Is there really no way to have it work with MQA without this? I use my headphones for like 8 hours a day and it is just unacceptable to me to have to close the Tidal app before listening to a 1-minute clip on YouTube or something, only to then fire up Tidal again...
2. I saw the instructions recommend to turn the force volume option but this just results in the headphones blasting something like 50 on the system scale (+100 on the Tidal knob because this maxes it by default) at me on every song which is way too loud. If I crank it down, it'll blast something around 50 at me on the next song anyway. Am I losing quality by disabling the volume force?
3. Should I enable passthrough MQA in Tidal's settings for the DFR? I saw online posts claiming you should do that as DFR handles it through its hardware but in my case, this just resulted in the light going from purple (MQA) to magenta (96kHz) immediately.
4. Should I install/configure something more in Windows settings or is the quality I'm getting now how it's going to stay?
Thanks a lot in advance for help and clarification!