As title states. Looking to stream Tidal and rely on the 976's DAC to decode the MQA.

Impatiently, I hooked up a PC last night and setup Tidal in Master Quality and it seemed to work. I couldn't figure out how to verify whether what I was streaming was actually encoded as MQA though. It seemed to sound better than Spotify, but I'll do a better side-by-side test soon.

I don't believe there has ever been a claim for MQA support although the 976 platform might be able to support it with the right licensing and software on the DAC/DSP.

If you are driving the 976 using Tidal running on a PC or Mac then the first unfolding of an MQA recording is performed by the Tidal software and output to the DAC as PCM at the rate of the first unfold (which may be higher, but depends on the recording). Tidal MQA recordings that are not unfolded at all can still sound different from the non-MQA versions. Listeners may prefer one or the other.