I’ve had the Khadas Tone Board for about a month and while it sounds good, I just wanted to post on some minor issues I’ve been experiencing and see if others might have the same.
Just to give you a sense of my hardware in case that might be contributing to the issue I’m using:
- A 2011 iMac
- A Cavalli Liquid Carbon X balanced headphone amplifier
- Audirvana and Tidal Native application for streaming
- Various headphones include Audeze LCD-3, Sennheiser HD800, Focal Clear and Noble K10 iem
Below are some of the issues:
- Tone Board connection to the iMac frequently drops. This usually happens overnight and not when I’m in the middle of playing music but it’s still annoying since I have to replug in the ToneBoard. I’ve tried several different USB C cables with no improvement. Seems like this might be a consistent problem with some units but wondering if folks experiencing it are also using an older Mac.
- Audirvana incompatibility. The Tone Board flat out doesn’t work with Audirvana. Whenever I select the ToneBoard as the output I get music playing with very heavy distortion. I can quickly switch to another software source and select the ToneBoard and it sounds fine (no distortion). It only seems to be a problem with the Audirvana software.
- There appears to be some sort of grounding issue with very sensitive headphones/iem. I just tried to listen to the ToneBoard/Liquid Carbon combo with my K10 iem using the balanced HP output and could hear static and interference (even with no music on). When I switched over to a balanced DAC connected to the Carbon - no issues and a totally black background. This might be a problem with SE RCA and interference from the computer but I still experienced the hum using a Audioquest Jitterbug with the Khadas. I only seem to hear it with the iems and not full sized headphones. Anyone else experienced similar issues?
I’m pretty sure that I updated the firmware on the device when I bought it.