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

Product Information

I cannot put a finger on anything that bothers me really with this unit, the soul of the music is here, it created emotions that only R2R units could easily unearth from my music, it has the soundstage of serious AKM designs, it has their flow, while retaining the best virtues of ESS-Sabre designs like detail retrieval, transparency, cleanness, speed and thunder like impact. Can I really complaint about anything wrong in this unit? I probably can’t.

Headphones: (i) Martin Logan Mikros 90 , Ultrasone PRO 780i , Beyerdynamic Amiron Home , Neumann NDH-30 , Ultrasone Edition Eleven ; (ii) Audeze MM-500 . Phase – Two positions are provided: Non-Inverted (default) or Inverted. Self-explanatory, leave it at default. The least impressive sounding inputs were Optical and Coaxial, I found them boring sounding at all times, transforming it from 3D to 2.5D sounding. The resolution took another hit and it seems that both inputs won’t accept MQA, native DSD, or 32-bit PCM material. Yikes!it’s an absolute steal and I mean it! Chip-based converters move away, there’s a new sheriff in town. I tested it in a high-end loudspeaker setup and also in several headphone setups. When I used it in the living room, I’ve tried it as a DAC + Pre unit and then only as a DAC, leaving the preamp duties to the Topping Pre90 or to a Benchmark HPA4. I’ve used a Keces S300 power amplifier, that was driving a pair of KEF Reference 3. The A26 is a much more resolving DAC that delineates reverb and subtleties found in a guitar twang. Adding some width at the cost of airiness, the SU-10 gives a more rigid tap to a piano accompaniment. A26 felt sharper sounding, with notes popping in and out faster. With all that being said, R26 was always beautiful sounding and quite magical as well. the biggest difference was felt in the treble. R26 always juggles with the idea of providing as much joy and satisfaction to the listener. It tells you fresh jokes and beautiful lies, and it does that with a happy face, getting so sweet and pleasant in the process. R26 will never offend you in the treble, even put on bright-sounding amplifiers, speakers, or headphones. While it didn’t slash bits of information, always sounding extended by going past the top octave, it just removed over-sharpness and timing errors. It felt just right, sometimes gently rounding the top octave that removed listening fatigue for good. A26 is doing that as well but to a lower degree. X26 PRO was detailed and sharp sounding (on a few occasions), R26 was detailed without being sharp …

A26 felt sharper sounding and slightly more defined, as the contours of the notes were outlined via A26. The latter has a higher dynamic range and with the right equipment and selection of music, you can hear that. 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. The bass quantity coming out of the A26 is deep and expansive and it plays pretty tight with the rest of the frequency. Its sway is more like a cornerstone holding everything together plus it has a slightly bouncy timbre to lessen the seriousness.

Tech Highlights

Run fdisk /dev/mmcblk0 and type dnnw exactly. One more thing that probably comes into play, well it doesnt hurt thats for sure. I put it in , but I never really did any critical listening. I changed the power cord to my Running Springs Audio Dmitri. I had a fairly inexpensive Pangea AC9SE power cord on it and I added a RSA High Zoot powercord. Wow what a nice cord. It is a 60 conductor litz construction, maybe a little more than 1 1/4 inches in diameter, but still very flexible. Getting to the unit itself, some of the rear ports are protected by covers. From the front, while the A26 came wrapped in a thin sheath of plastic, Gustard neglected to include a screen protector for the glass strip running across.

Hi - thanks for writing this up - very nice. I'm trying it on an A26 with renderer 1.4 and having some issues though. Once I got to resizing the partitions it's not working. Upon entering fdisk, it mentions: Brightness: has 8 brightness positions, none of them are completely dimming its display. The lowest position (1) worked great at night though.Trying something different, I also used the ATH-ADX5000 with a Violectric V281. I prefer this pairing for easier listening since it complements the unaggressive A26 without ending up as too mellow. 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. As a general rule of thumb, you are getting a softer sound with resistor ladder DACs and a speedier one with chip-based converters. If you wanted to have them both, then you needed to eat more bread and less pudding & cook your own meals for a few blood moons. Nonetheless, Gustard shattered my preconceptions with R26, which I’m still using on a daily basis. DACs: Gustard A26, Gustard R26, Chord Electronics DAVE, Gold Note DS-10 PLUS & PSU-10 EVO, SMSL D400EX