Ok, after hrs of head scratching, I found the problem, in the main box settings, under sound, there is a volume control which only affects music, games, and media, this was set to zero !!!, music of course played through the box, set to RAW and via spdif to a dac sounds horrid, their seems to be no way of bypassing the android sound processing completely, in the same way as Foobar, Jriver etc do in Windows ?, which would make this volume control innoperative
Cheers Chris