It has pretty much the same case of their A22 DAC, that is looking like an uni-body case, crafted on a CNC machine.

Both versions look extremely classy if I say so myself, and I have the all-black version here which puts every other DAC reviewed to shame in terms of fit and finish. Samantha’s voice is sweet as nectar, acoustic guitars are vibrating naturally, vanishing slowly and gradually from the picture.If you want to squeeze maximum performance out of it, then you will need to use its internal streamer via Ethernet. I’m rarely testing units that have little to no drawbacks, and I’m sorry but except for that plasticky remote control, I cannot complain about its look, build quality, and more importantly its sound.

Considering that I already have a super honest and highly resolving sounding unit, I’ll probably stick to my Chord DAVE for a while now, but if I didn’t have it already, then I would be rocking an R26 and an A26 in no time! With A26, everything felt precise, sharp and correct, yet it wasn’t as magical as it was via R26 – which added longer trails and placed additional bubbles of air in between them. 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.Take pocked-sized state-of-the-art measuring DACs of Topping, SMSL, and even of Gustard like X16, which will reveal the last bits of information way too easily. I say that because when I listened to the R26 I wasn’t sitting there thinking, “oh this really sounds A LOT different than a chip-DAC. For a few seconds, I went louder compared to my usual listening levels, and yet the bass felt as controlled, clean, layered, and deep-reaching.

Gustard impressed the hell out of me with their R26, so much so that I went ahead and purchased a silver surfer to be used in my headphone setup. The newest silicon no longer has an internal delta-sigma modulator, meaning that an additional chip will be needed for that specific task. While the movie Hanna was just alright, its soundtrack was exemplary by one of the most influential bands of my youth. Combining a mid-forward sound with a clearer image, the sound felt stronger and somewhat weightier, carrying more music with every single strike. In the latest stages of this review I checked all its digital inputs, connected to a PC, to my TV or to a Music Server and I also used it as a DAC and Preamp combo, just in case you’ll be using it this way in tandem with a power amplifier.The A26 is much easier to operate than ever before, and you don’t even need its remote control in a head-fi setup.

In particular, its DACs have been getting notorious acclaim among audiophiles for both headphones as well as speaker systems, often rivaling products from more established western brands that cost several times more.In my experience, D/A converters with powerful analog output stages and overkill power supplies could stretch my music wider, so I could look deeper into the mix.