as the term unfolding doesn't mean anything and is just a play on word with the all origami marketing, they can describe pretty much any processing as an unfolding step.
here is probably the most information we're ever going to get:
https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/pdfs/c9207ae3fbb2bdf725cc/US20150154969A1.pdf
first, let's be clear, MQA is X bits of PCM file, then Y bits of one encoding, and then sometimes Z bits of a second encoding. so right there I'd argue that you really can only "unfold" 2 stuff. the fact that things may or may not get complicated and involve more steps is clearly not necessary for the file itself. we're in the digital domain, the right app and the right codecs are all we could ever need to turn this into its final Pokemon form.
now I do see 2 reasons to involve a physical device in the last steps or what we may decide to call last unfolding, maybe:
one is BS about DRM and making a magic little light glow. they may have decided to only give the decoding ability as a hardware chip or something like that.
the second is that the entire process is including Meridian's apodizing filter for the DAC. a process where they oversample X2 the signal and end up applying an antialiazing filter that's not great objectively but that their own internal self paid study has "demonstrated" to be subjectively preferred compared to some irrelevant other option that pretty much nobody uses. that too would require a DAC manufacturer to open his device to
Meridian MQA and let them replace their filter with MQA's stuff at least to deal with MQA files. chances are that most of the time this is really all the extra step you get. but maybe with the bigger files(24bit MQA), there is indeed some extra stuff to be decoded only there and to be used as intended instead of just wasting space. I don't really know. and the patent offers a range of possible uses without telling which one will be applied to a given file or when they'll artificially limit the decoding for the lolz.
so from my point of view and mostly based on memories, there's a chance that the third unfolding is really just the apodizing filter. IDK.
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