Tom,
I was under the impression that with Tidal software decode of MQA stream you do not need to MQA dac. Is my impression wrong?
I believe this is true of you are using Tidal PC App and taking an audio out from the PC itself. If you are outputting a digital signal it is up to the external DAC you are feeding to "unpack" the MQA (or is can just play the file using standard Redbook D/A conversion).
In the case of my Bluesound Node, they recently issued a software update that enables the onboard DAC in the Node to do full MQA decoding. From my listening experience so far the analog outs of the Node (doing the full MQA) and the output of my EE DAC are very close, but upon critical listening the EE is still a slight bit better, even without the full MQA. Which does not surprise me as teh Node cost half of what the EE does and it has all of the streaming stuff in it in addition to the DAC. (BTW it is not close when playing standard Redbook files through both, the EE is way better, so the MQA is doing something right.)