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

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Quite far in the area of resolution, the treble region shows the advantage of getting the more expensive machine. Electric guitars don’t feel as easy and steady. While it is still remarkable, it is missing the control I heard on the A26. Chord Electronics Qutest Technical DSD Filter – Two options are provided. You can choose between a Narrow Bandwidth for a smoother top-end or a Wide Bandwidth for extended treble delivery. I wont try and do an indepth review. The A26 does not dissappoint, it is excellent. It has a big soundstage, nice and wide, maybe not as deep as wide. Lots of detail and great bass. Voices are centered, but maybe a little closer than I am used to...probably just a smidge. The A26 is still burning in and by all accounts it needs 50 or 100 hours to really shine, but I think it sounds pretty dam good out of the box. If I had to nitpic the A26 could use a metal remote, but really I dont care. The display is a little hard to read, but that is my failing eyesight. The build feels great and it has some weight.

While this unit completely discards over-sharpness and remaining traces of listening fatigue, it never discards bits of information … Gustard went overkill everywhere inside, including its capacitance is much higher than needed. I mean even several amplifiers are not using such a big capacitance for power filtering and storing. I’m spotting only Nichicon KG capacitors, those are currently the best Nichicon is making, also called as Gold Tone for their excellent performance characteristics. At this point I thought it would probably be safer to remove the SD card and do the work on a Raspberry Pi using an SD card reader. it gave me the same warning about the hybrid partition table(s). Reading a bit it seemed that the answer was to use fdisk to edit both the GPT and hybrid MBR consistently. I did this and the resulting 'p' outputs look like this once I'd deleted the 2G partitiona and re-added it as 20G: The stage allows the rich bass to not divide attention in a busy mix. What is more, with meticulous layering and dynamics to generate a realistic hall, it is easy to get deep into the finer details of the song without the A26 suggesting any snags. sed -i 's/HiTide RasPi Streamer/Gustard R26/g' /lib/systemd/system/ifi-streamer-tidal-connect.serviceIn simpler words, what a single AK4499EQ chip could do a few years ago was moved into three separate devices, two AK4499EX (for a fully balanced signal), and a single AK4191 used as a premium delta-sigma modulator. Since every chip does its own thing never to be bothered with additional tasks, the noise floor and distortion lowered, the sound became faster and more accurate than ever before. Like the A26, the NEO Stream follows the design of a close family member. This somehow dilutes the excitement unlike when an all-new chassis is launched but I’d say both the NEO Stream and the A26 had some bits and pieces that still make them stand out.

It might look raw and unpolished around the edges, but it’s not really the case (Audio-GD units are mostly like that), its corners and edges are sanded on a small scale, so it wouldn’t damage your expensive headphones while handling them around. It has a flushed On/Off button, its menu is cleverly designed, looking almost invisible in a dark environment. Its monochrome OLED screen is quite big, a bigger font was also used, so you can easily read it from afar in a loudspeaker setup. It has several brightness levels which makes it even more versatile to be used in late night listening sessions. 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. I did a 'w' in MBR mode (didn't seem to do anything) and then 'r' to return to GPT mode and then 'w' to write and exit. On exit, it output:A26 was smaller sounding and you can feel that music emanated from a nearer inception point versus the R26, ultimately getting a faster decay and better control of the drivers. With all that said, the transient response guy won’t be side-grading his R26 with an A26, as the former still has plenty of life in it, hiding a few aces under its sleeve which will be revealed later into the game. In terms of build quality, both are carved on CNC machines with very tight tolerance numbers, they both look and feel like expensive units. Although in terms of looks, I’ll give an edge to the Element X which looks nicer, more futuristic and way more elegant. Element X is one of the biggest D/S DAC I’ve tested so far and it is currently the best sounding one too, it is my reference together with the Audiobyte HydraVox. Unsurprisingly, X26 PRO is even bigger, much heavier, hotter on the outside, consuming twice as much power to the Element X, thanks to its Class-A I/V conversion, LPF and output stage. Breaking away from what used to be done inside a single chip, the AK4191 has been designed and conceptualized for discrete digital filtering and delta-sigma modulation. Where the traditional digital-to-analog conversion happens is in a dual-DAC AK4499EX implementation.

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!Part B) Or you can enable DSD direct and/or PCM NOS ON and this bypasses all the filters and just sends the digital signal to the ladder." Swapping headphones to the Dan Clark Audio Ether 2, with its rather tamed tuning compared to the ATH-ADX5000, the pairing got somewhat cold. Still, the Ether 2 remained revealing in key areas such as vocals plus there is a low-end planar dynamism that brings in some peppiness and bite to the A26. The glass strip decorating the front of the A26 now has a central OLED display. It looks better put together than the slightly right-biased display on the R26. Gustard also upgraded the UI by decongesting the settings menu for a less busy look. Connected to a Trafomatic Primavera or Enleum AMP-23R whilst driving a pair of Hifiman Susvara, I felt massive shifts in dynamics happening in between my earlobes, getting a punchier and a livelier sound, as if describing a bass-heavy set of headphones. Symbolico’s Perceiving All ( Qobuz / Tidal) is a masterfully crafted album for the 21st-century audiophile, pushing dynamics higher and making me curious about the sound placements happening all around while providing lightning-fast decays of the notes. Gustard A26 together with Enleum’s AMP-23R and Hifiman’s Susvara were firing machine-gun bass notes, sending my earlobes into a non-stop flip-flap fiesta. With R26, I could catch my breath and relax my mind in between passages, but with A26 it felt like an act of self-punishment, constantly bombarding my hearing apparatuses with energy-filled sounds that were coming from everywhere. A26 was smaller sounding and you can feel that music emanated from a nearer inception point versus the R26, ultimately getting a faster decay and better control of the drivers. With all that said, the transient response guy won’t be side-grading his R26 with an A26, as the former still has plenty of life in it, hiding a few aces under its sleeve which will be revealed later into the game.

sed -i 's/passthrough false/passthrough true/g' /lib/systemd/system/ifi-streamer-tidal-connect.serviceDitching their iconic control wheel for a set of touch sensors, Gustard enabled a symmetric design on the A26. It does show fingerprints quite easily, so either use the remote or wipe it pretty often to keep it clean. I initially tossed aside the USB cable provided without taking a proper look. It took me a while but when I noticed that the terminations are gold plated and the wire has a substantial gauge, I thought it was worth a try nonetheless. DACs: Gustard X26 PRO, Gustard X16, Matrix Audio Element X, Audiobyte HydraVox + HydraZap, Flux Lab Acoustics FCN-10