It is some kind of strange to read this "Oh, I can´t wait to get a balanced, humpless Tone Board"
First of all, how many percent of you are able to use the benefits of a balanced connection?
Five? And do you need it for it´s original purpse, to send an audio signal over long distances
or do you just want to hook on the amp, just sitting beneath it?
My main DAC a from Twistedpearaudio has single ended and balanced output.
In 9 years, I only needed the balanced output once, to hook on a professional recorder to convert from 48kHz
to 44.1 in the analog domain...
But as far as I understood the signal path
internally could be balanced, maybe a mean to get rid of the hump.
As far as I understood the schematics from Khadas, they did not do this, but I might be wrong here.
Also very interesting, but just an anecdote, not scientific: I brought the tone board to a friend and we compared it
to a Marantz CD-80 from 1989. We knew that both were not matched, we could trick ourselves by one
of us switching between the Marantz and Khadas, while the other one would loose track over time what was on.
In a live recording (Nik Bärtsch Live, ECM) we were not able to tell a differnce. With another recording,
(David Sylvian, Secrets of the Beehive, analog recording, you could her the tape hiss) we both had the impression
the Marantz sounded more pleasant and "warm". Maybe the hiss served as a good dither...
But we both know, that the Marantz would measure far worse than the Khadas....