Apart from that, we are still looking at an elegant unit with a high WAF attached to it. I had complained about the raw and unpolished look of their older devices, but the A26 feels way more refined from any point of view. High-end electronics are becoming modern furniture, and I like when they blend seamlessly with their surroundings, and I can certainly see that on the A26. Both units have two internal linear power supply that routes power separately to the digital and analog parts of the circuitry. Tech-wise, the A26 ends up being the more modern of the two in using a touch-sensitive interface rather than a multifunction knob.

A26 seems much closer to DAVE as opposed to R26, always getting a highly detailed, yet organic sound that people are usually chasing. 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. it’s an absolute steal and I mean it! Chip-based converters move away, there’s a new sheriff in town.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. The Qutest is not completely designed from scratch though. Based on the original Hugo2 DAC/Amp the Qutest system is now a few years older than the A26 which uses the latest chips from AKM. 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.

Combining a mid-forward sound with a clearer image, the sound felt stronger and somewhat weightier, carrying more music with every single strike. … Sounds weren’t traveling long distances as A26 felt more intimate, delivering higher energy when hitting my eardrums at the cost of a less impressive layering. In this regard, A26 was very impressive, getting clear and defined bass notes that were playful and quite fun at the same time. 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.By default, it will automatically dim the central OLED display after a few seconds while waiting for a command. The touch controls on either side will remain active and not get affected by the screen saver. 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. DACs: Gustard A26, Gustard R26, Chord Electronics DAVE, Gold Note DS-10 PLUS & PSU-10 EVO, SMSL D400EX 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: 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’m dealing with a 10 out of 10 bass slam and impact, with a 9.5 out of 10 speed and decay of the notes – a point where X26 PRO sounded by a hair faster. Still for an R-2R DAC getting a lightning-fast speed and decay? I’m taking my hat off; it was masterfully done! 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.For the A26, the left-to-right width is almost boundless. Only when piecing it together with the depth, it can be perceived that the front imaging is inching just a few steps closer. 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.