What did a good 10 MHz clock do for your Gustard R26?

@kairosman I'm starting to suspect I have a bad unit. This is my second attempt to purchase the R26. The first one was very dark to the point of sounding broken. This one is better but still soft in the top octave, and the problem with imaging is very curious (I get fantastic imaging on other DACs). I have about 100 hours of burn-in on the R26 so I'm going to give it another 100 hours.

@magon what settings are you using for filter and NOS mode? What cables are you using?

Most importantly detail what your definition of imaging is, I find significant differences between people in how they define that parameter...

@kairosman I'm using custom cabling (interconnects, power cords, USB cable) by the same guy who modified my x20pro... it's very good stuff. His friends in the N.J. Audio Society say it compares favorably to multiple-$1000 commercial stuff, but I've never heard anything other than Igor's cable except for low-end Cardas and such. The "slow" filter sounded best for detail and microdynamics. I didn't like NOS much. 

When I refer to imaging I'm actually talking not about my headphones but about my humble speakers... Spendor S3/5. They have great imaging with my modified Gustard x20pro, in terms of the spooky realistic sense that you can face the direct source of sound and pinpoint its location in space. With the R26 the images tend to exist in either left, center, or right, and not be stable. The sizzle on a violin might seem to come from a different place than the body of it. 

The headspace of the R26, with headphones, is decent. I like a sense of open sound when I'm using headphones, i.e. that the boundaries of my head aren't precisely limited, and I get that with the R26. 

What my R26 does really well is soft music, like the fade to silence (or fade up from silence) of a reed instrument. But in general it seems too soft in the top octave.. it requires careful attention to pick up on details. It doesn't grab me like the x20pro. 

Right now, it's playing pink noise through my relatively new LCD-X, so we'll see how they both sound in a few days when it reaches 200 hours.

@magon 

It's complicated. I don't have the R26, but I do have the x26 PRO. I first added the C18 master clock to clock both the X26 and LHY-SW10 ethernet switch. It didn't make much of a difference for my Innuos ZENith mk3 streamer connected to the X26 PRO via Network Acoustic Eno III USB cable. However, I then added a DDC U18 to feed the USB cable into it and exiting via a I2s Purist HDMI cable to the X26 PRO.  And the U18 is also clocked by the C18. And WOW!!!

The sound has taken a big leap forward in every way. It's complicated because doing all these upgrades is what finally brought it all together. Exactly what did what is hard to say except that the DDC to send the USB into I2s via Purist cable was a major factor. Just adding a master clock without going any further would not give you that wow factor.

In the end, like many, I do now agree that a master clock is valuable to clock multiple pieces together but is not very effective reclocking a single unit. It only makes sense.