No worries glad it helped, I can sympathise with your frustration! I possibly think this thread may go big given your own experience and preference to the previous firmware. It will be seen if other Toneboard1 owners feel the same and discuss here. The question could be what is right for you? As you have stated it is your own listening experience that matters, it is all about the music after all that is really what counts.
i agree that the windoze xmos driver sounds fine - back when it originally auto-updated i changed it back and preferred the windoze one, or probably more correctly thought they were equivalent enough that i preferred not to have to battle with the o.s. to repeatedly fight off its enthusiasm to âfixâ the perceived problem of a non-proprietary driver
as for asio (apart from being the australian secret service of the same name), i have read that it makes no perceivable difference, although next time i need some frustration, i can set it up - iâm running foobar (with the skin that makes it look like an early version of i-tunes, without having to again fight off unwanted âupgradesâ)
sources are mainly flac ripped at 44.1k / 16bit, streamed from the nas, plus a selection of higher bitrate stuff that sort of fell of the interweb somehow - donât tell asio, i guess
ps. piano and vocals sound lovely with 1.04; it was somehow mixed way back on v2 with my system
If itâs good with old FW with your equipment, then stay at what you like. At least you have experienced the different between them.
Since HD is cheap, I have been ripping my CDs as uncompressed FLAC so the BiteRate is very high. Each file is between 50mb-80mb where it comes out 700-750mb each CD. Even thought the CD still sounds better than FLAC but not that bad to compare of. I can live with FLAC, less hassle to swap the CDs. I bought a few SACD on Amazon and ripped as well but canât tell the different between SACD and ISO rip.
SPDIF spec is lower than than the USB but majority of SPDIF devices are decent since you donât run high format songs. Whatever the FW is, the SPDIF is pretty much the same. However, if you use USB, then itâs different. I am happy with new FW for the USB because SACD ISO DSD works perfect with new FW. It doesnât hurt if you want to upgrade the FW in case you want to use with USB later. Since you use SPDIF often, you may able to tell if the new FW is sound better or the same. I have used absolutely SPDIF input for CDs player on different DACs before, itâs better than using USB.
I was running Dietpi 6.31.2 and I am update to 6.35.0. Not sure if this is what you need. The update failed, so I will need to reflash my SD card and reinstall Dietpi.