Requested the beta firmware yesterday for my Amp and it arrived overnight - don’t recall the update saying anything other than it was for USB Out.
First fleeting thoughts:
1. As mentioned before, it does allow the use of both USB Media input and USB Output at the same time thru the use of a USB hub. I used this cheap hub (
www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0CQRN5CB9/ ) and a usb y-splitter to both power my external SSD drive and feed the USB Audio to my Linn amp. Indeed, I even played some tracks from the USB drive back out thru to my amp with no issues.
2. The Audio Settings for USB Out are rather scant compared to optical&digital out - just Volume Limit, Audio Channel, Volume Balance, and Fade-in & Fade-out Effects. Thinking about it a bit more, the audio stream I guess is different - for USB, it’s still in effect a “data” stream rather than the PCM stereo stream the others produce. That probably explains the reduced set of settings, why volume levels differ and why (in contradiction to what I presumed earlier) EQ/PEQ aren’t applied to USB Out.