GUSTARD A26 DAC MQA Dual AK4499EX AK4191 With Streamer/Renderer XMOS DSD512 PCM768K MQA384K IIS Balanced Audio Decoder Black

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With AKM being a powerhouse name in the DAC chip manufacturing industry, it seems easier to simply rely on their off-the-shelf components. Treble is the standard ESS Sabre affair, without the usual glare and brightness associated with this chipset. It goes sky high, there are as many details as you please, it just breathes in the treble. You will not find nasty pre or post-ringing in the treble. Its timing its perfect and it never appeared as harsh or bright sounding to me. The interesting part is that X26 PRO was always connected to a Benchmark HPA4 that is straight as a line and doesn’t awake as many emotions, it can even transform several sources into bright ones, but that never happened, even for a micro-second with the Gustard unit. I’m glad to tell you that it pairs very well with lean and linear setups, you can easily use it bright setups too. It worked with warm sounding setups, I personally used several Class-A amplifiers and it worked great with all of them. Keep in mind that you can also alter its voicing a little bit, by the help of its digital filters and NOS modes. Headphones: (i) Martin Logan Mikros 90 , Ultrasone PRO 780i , Beyerdynamic Amiron Home , Neumann NDH-30 , Ultrasone Edition Eleven ; (ii) Audeze MM-500 . In the headphone setup, it was mostly connected to the Benchmark HPA4 driving several high-end planar-magnetic headphones and a bunch of dynamic headphones. Okay folks, enough with the talk, my ears are itching for some music, so let’s hit some ear-drums!

In the end, A26 covered the frequency response in full, adding more energy in the bass and midrange while marginally lowering it in the treble. sed -i 's/HiTide RasPi Streamer/Gustard R26/g' /lib/systemd/system/ifi-streamer-tidal-connect.service There is no digital passthrough in the A26 so only analog signals come out. The measured dynamic range is >127dB and the THD+N is <=0.0001% which are both respectable.

Both devices used as DACs offer a bit of flexibility to the sound just to tease. The A26 however is more detail oriented which becomes its crucial advantage if all the bells and whistles of the NEO Stream can be ignored. The Qutest traverses the line of honesty just like the A26 and it also loosens up a bit on tonality by adding some well-placed personality here and there. To be honest, I wasn’t expecting the Qutest to need to fight as hard just to prove its worth against the A26.

I can complain only about its case design, which looks bland and uninspiring, but everything else feels and performs at a very high level. X26 PRO just scored a Gold Award and it is fully deserved. Congratulations to the team! Headphone Amps: Trafomatic Primavera, Trafomatic Head 2, Enleum AMP-23R, Ferrum OOR + HYPSOS, Burson Soloist 3X GT, Flux Lab Acoustics Volot

If you're going to Windows WSL route, follow this to mount Gustard R26 to your WSL. Otherwise, just mount your R26 using mount on Linux. I will skip their specs and looks, focusing on their feature set and sound performance. Both units have been tested in headphone and stereo setups, I used the same power cables and interconnects. I didn’t need to re-adjust their voltage output, as both are providing 5V volts at full power.