Gustard R26


Is anyone else looking forward to the reviews coming out on the Gustard R26 r2rDac? I am interested to see if it can compete with the Holo Spring at a lower price point. How will it stand up to the other r2r dac’s out there right now. It does present well and is feature rich right out of the box. Is it a true proprietary resistor board or is it off the shelf and tweaked? I know the other Gustard equipment is well received and liked so my hopes are high for this as well.

sgreg1

@whart  I'm guessing @sgreg1  is referring to the thread at Head-Fi which is almost 2300 posts long.  Many of the posts are fairly technical so that might be a better place to ask your question about DSD.

I'm looking forward to seeing how the R26 changes with more burn in.  I was just excited about how it sounded after only 36 hours.

Thanks both. I'll do a little digging. I'm glad you are excited, @pinwa That's usually a good sign. 

@pinwa I have to ask why you wouldn’t also feed the R26 with the Iris?  When I fed my R2R DAC with the Iris and an i2S connection the difference was quite remarkable.  Seems like the R26 is fighting with one arm behind its back at this point. 

@soix Three reasons.  1) The Raspberry Pi endpoint might be the weak point in my streaming setup so directly connecting the LAN to the R26 was attractive.  2) The Iris is incompatible with the I2S pinout of the R26 so that mode of connection is unavailable.  3) With the X26 the Iris makes very little difference vs a USB connection direct to the Raspberry Pi.  The difference is small enough that it is hard to hear much less decide that it is better.  The only reason I use the Iris is because it "ought" to be better, not because I know that it is better.

@pinwa 

get on the head fi discussion. There are details on the I2S pin configuration for r26. In simple form people have had to short pin 15. There are other DDS units that work with r26.