Having spoken to MQA at CES last week, they told me MQA decoding can take place at either the server/streamer level or at the DAC. You don't need both although there's no problem if you have both and there's no SQ advantage to having the decoder at one position or the other. At the server/streamer level, depending on the hardware, a software update is all that you might need. This will be the case with the likes of Auralic, Aurender and Lumin. I have confirmed that with them. For MQA decoding at the DAC level, as most DACs are not computers, most DACs will need to incorporate a hardware MQA decoder and apparently this is not a simple task. Several DAC manufacturers I spoke with have no immediate plans to do this. While the DAVE is technically a computer, when I asked Rob this question last month, he indicated MQA decoding will have to take place at the source and not within the DAVE.
When I spoke with Auralic, their Aries and Aries Mini will have MQA decoding capability with their next firmware release due soon and they expect that none of the DACs they connect with will have problems. When I spoke with Aurender, they are committed to MQA also but their rollout will take time (months) because in their words, they value a smooth user experience free of glitches and so while their hardware will do the decoding, they want to do extensive testing with various DACs to make sure there are no problems. When I spoke with MQA about this, they confirmed that there is the potential for problems with certain DACs although the problem they suggest sounds quite minor. The problem they foresee is that if an MQA file houses a 24/352 file, for example, and if the DAC is not capable of playing that file, you could have a glitch, possibly in the form of a lock up. With MQA files, apparently there is no way to know the bit depth or sampling rate of the file stored within until after the file has been decoded. With the DAVE, there should be no issues that I foresee as the DAVE, through USB, is capable of playing everything up to 4x DSD and 768 KHz sampling.