There’s a typo in the first line of my above post. Where it says “The quality of the cables you use to connect your DDC to DAC can easily make or break the benefits of using the DAC”, it should have said “The quality of the cables you use to connect your DDC to DAC can easily make or break the...

use the shortest and highest quality ones you can find. Try a number of HDMI and clock cables and you will find that some are definitely better than others for DDC SQ

The quality of the cables you use to connect your DDC to DAC can easily make or break the benefits of using the DAC. Use the shortest possible length of the very best SPDIF over HDMI and clock cables you can get. Revaluation Audio will make them for you and you will be amazed at the SQ they...

What preamp are you using?

The firmware update worked out for me as well. In my system, the SQ improvements are as described by EugeneIChng, The analog output level now appears to be quite a bit higher than before the firmware update. I suspect that some other’s descriptions of the SQ as having become rather harsh...