DACs: Gustard A26, Gustard R26, Chord Electronics DAVE, Gold Note DS-10 PLUS & PSU-10 EVO, SMSL D400EX What was quite amazing is that several amplifiers that aren’t known to be impressive when it comes to bass delivery and speed, X26 PRO awoke them from their deep sleep, giving a huge helping hand and the same can be said about mellow sounding headphones and loudspeakers. The best of Gustard with its overkill capacitance would infuse more positive vibes, more uplifting beats, that would cure even slow and boring setups. If you really need more slam, more body and a faster pace…I think I found a cure for the boringness of your setup. At this size, weight and capacitance, it was clear that at least several days of burn-in are needed before I can take it seriously for a long listening session. While I was writing and filming my Musician Andromeda review, the X26 PRO was connected to a balanced headphone amplifier, so that its entire circuit would be used. One week passed, I calmed my spirits and I sat down for a long listening session.

If the scale of the music is important to you, being immersed in your music, having a very good placement of all the notes around you, then I just described one of the most impressive delta-sigma DACs I’ve tried of late. 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.While this unit completely discards over-sharpness and remaining traces of listening fatigue, it never discards bits of information … In the first room you can spot two encapsulated 50W linear transformers, which are on the heavier side. You can certainly feel their weight on that part of the case. One transformer is powering the analog section and the second one the digital section, which is an amazing design decision, something I already saw on X26 PRO and R26.

I couldn't find anything...in the manual...other than... keep the volume at 0db and it by pass the attenuator Additionally: If you are not using Roon, you can save 50MB of RAM by disabling Roon Bridge. Temporarily: systemctl stop roonbridge.service Completely disable: systemctl disable roonbridge.service 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. 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. DACs: Gustard X26 PRO, Gustard X16, Matrix Audio Element X, Audiobyte HydraVox + HydraZap, Flux Lab Acoustics FCN-10

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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. 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 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.

SMSL SU-10

Fresh power tubes and NOS driver tubes for my Trafomatic Primavera arrived a few days ago and as you can imagine, headphone listening came first but don’t you worry, it was used in an equally impressive stereo setup, getting a complete picture about its performance. Both are speedy and impactful sounding, but the music feels more elastic on R26 when coming from a crowded to a live recording. Sometimes it feels deeper sounding with R26, there is a longer travel until the sounds are reaching my body and this gives an impression that A26 is marginally faster sounding. They both pound and slam with a higher force than any SMSL or Topping-made units, even compared to a few pricier DACs, but since A26 is more immediate and closer sounding, the sound feels punchier by a little. The difference is quite small, but it’s detectable. Run apt update && apt install -y multiarch-support libavformat57 libidn11 git libportaudio2* libflac++6v5* libavahi-common3 libavahi-client3 alsa-utils On the lower frequencies, the Qutest showed a tighter trait on instrument placement. The A26 however is the one that readily displayed its nature through its richer thump that slightly lingered longer for room definition.