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

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Besides, A26 supports MQA, and easy access to high-quality online streams, like Roon, UPnP, and HQPlayer NAA at present, and more protocols will be shown in near future. More on the grills adorning the sides, the silver color option does help it pop more. And, the almost closed-off internals of the A26 breathes through the slim slits carefully hidden on its upper portion. Long story short, if you love modern and impactful tunes, but still want that life-like and natural presentation of R-2R ladder DACs, then R26 Discrete is so far, the easiest recommendation to make. While R26 is still a true bargain and I won’t part ways with it anytime soon, A26 is the true value king, the giant killer that will be remembered for a very long time. Aoshida was awesome to deal with. It was going going to ship from China and not be here until sometime in begining of July. Well it was Shipped by FedEx on June 27 and it was delivered Friday June 30. I wasted no time hooking it up. I had to install a driver for Windows 11 and it went seemlessly as a component for Foobar 2000.

The A26, and the R26 for that matter, are Gustard’s most ambitious showpiece yet and the progression of their designs shows. Simple yet worthy of a few snaps, the front of the unit is sleek and the characteristic accents on either side only deepen the firm lure. What the R26 has is an ethernet input that supports being a Roon endpoint or a UPnP MediaRenderer. It's just an additional digital input to the DAC. Just in this case it is an ethernet input.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: In the end, A26 felt like a better unit when pointing out the location of every instrument, while pushing the sounds somewhat closer versus the R26. I love them both for what they are and if you already own any of these, it will be foolish to side-grading to the second unit, unless you need a second DAC.

I tested an A-GD R7 a while ago and it was indeed quite slow and mellow, but R26 feels like a different beast altogether." 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. 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. Headphones: (i) Martin Logan Mikros 90 , Ultrasone PRO 780i , Beyerdynamic Amiron Home , Neumann NDH-30 , Ultrasone Edition Eleven ; (ii) Audeze MM-500 . 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.Theoretically, the streamer should be the same. I think it'll work. There is one more change to the instructions. You can also update upmpdcli which is UPnP Media Renderer. Since the www.lesbonscomptes.com repository key has expired, run the following lines before ssh into R26: gpg --no-default-keyring --keyring ./lesbonscomptes.gpg --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-key F8E3347256922A8AE767605B7808CE96D38B9201

In the end, I find them comparable, yet different sounding, and depending on your taste you might prefer one or the other and that’s perfectly fine. I’m surprised that Gustard lowered the price to be in line with X26 PRO, but still kept the Streamer and Ethernet port of the pricier R26 Discrete. Regardless of what unit you will be choosing, you will be getting a top-notch D/A converter that’s comparable or better versus pricier units.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: 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. While not always the case, one observation I had climbing up the ladder to more expensive DACs is that the stage becomes less about the dimensionality as they get better in their disappearing act. Making clean, detailed and fast sounding R-2R ladder DACs is extremely difficult, time consuming and costly, as usually these units need a custom FPGA that will solve of the errors made by the ladders. That’s precisely why technical sounding R-2R DACs are usually unobtanium material, sky being their limit price wise.

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. Run fdisk /dev/mmcblk0 and type dnnw exactly. Before going deep into the rabbit hole, let’s once again remember what a DAC needs to do in the first place. A DAC is a mini computer that receives a digital signal and outputs an analog one that will be amplified later on. A DAC crunches math and there’s no ambiguity in its job. It needs to be flawless, without inducing any errors in the chain. The problem is that the whole unbridled, honest, and non-sugar-coated truth is oftentimes hard to accept. Usually, people want nice stories and high doses of dopamine injected into their bloodstream. A good DAC should be the bearer of truth, although it could be a pain where the sun doesn’t shine and the truth is unbearable a lot of times. Chord however got more involved when they opted to custom code an FPGA-based XC7A15T chip to their standards. Peer into the viewing glass of the Qutest and the Xilinx module can be appreciated.Taking the first half of its name, the Qutest looks cute compared to the A26. I have nothing against big or small DACs but one should consider where they’ll put their setup. For me, the Qutest can easily sit anywhere, which is one of the main reasons I haven’t sold it. 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. Is -00 dB etc, the range that I use to control volume if the DAC is connected directly to a power amp? And is 0 dB "silent" aka, no sound, Audiophonics is a company created in 2005, specialized in the distribution and sale of Audio, HiFi, Do It Yourself and electronic products on the internet. To propose qualitative products at the best price, here is the philosophy that guides us every day. We put a strong emphasis on being the first to offer innovative products that match the expectations of the market and customers.