Gustard R26

I hope they begin 1v1 Battle all of these firmware upgrades online.

OP, any update of the r26?

Yes I received the r26 and have been out of country for a while but now back. Have about 150 hours on it. I will try to make this short. I have never been more pleased with a purchase ever. First listening the bass jumped out and highs were sharp and sterile. At about 75 hours it all started to come together. I have thrown every thing at this I can and I just want to listen to more. My favorite setting is Qobuz through lan and nos. The sound stage is huge and at any time you can single out sny instrument you want to listen to. I think the biggest take away is my Vandersteen 2 se signatures sound like they are four times bigger than before. This dac is best described as musical you just want to sit and list to more. My go to Stevie Ray “tin pan alley” was given new life. When Stevie is singing the lyrics “better place to be” when both b’s are started you ban hear the air hitting the mic. Same with Tull “thick as a brick” you can almost feel Ian Anderson spitting on you when playing the flute. With the majority of dac’s I have heard the one thing I have never been impressed with have been drums. To me digital just can’t do drums until now. It is not perfect but the note decay for drums is the best I have heard. This will not go down as the best dac that can compete with the 20k and 30k models but it should win the award for best bang for the buck dac hands down. Down the road I will look into a ddc unit to take advantage of the I2S connection and external clocking but right now the Gustard R26 does not make me feel rushed at all. Anyone sitting on the fence jump off head first.

@sgreg1 thanks for taking risk and sharing your experience! 

I am surprised to hear as Gustard design engineers were able to produce decent R2R DAC product! Creating R2R DAC, assuming 20years product life time and other variables,  is very hard! So far my favorite R2R DAC is the latest XD series of Esoteric (same as Teac), which I trust more because of previous experience.

@westcoastaudiophile - Glad you're enjoying the Esoteric XD series. One point of correction though is that they are not using an R2R DAC design, according to their website the proprietary XD DACs are a discrete design using ESOTERIC’s exclusive Delta-Sigma (ΔΣ) modulator. You may have confused the fact that they're a discrete design with them being R2R. Just a technicality though, what really matters is their performance which by all reports is exceptional.