HelloLong live chi-fi
I recently borrowed a Gustard X-26 Pro to try out in my room a few weeks back. I belong in a group who are prejudiced against ESS chips, and consider them to be bright, edgy, sibilant, brittle and lean with the typical ESS glare.
However, the Gustard with its excellent power supplies and class A output stages was none of the above. So, to say I was pleasantly surprised would be an under statement. My last tryst with a ESS chip didnt last 20 mins, but I thoroughly enjoyed the Gustard.
My current Dac is an Esoteric K-01, which while still a reference level CD player, its USB implementation is dated and does'nt support DSD via its USB board from a Linux based streamer, though it will still accept via a PC with the Esoteric driver installed. I was thoroughly enjoying it via coaxial from a Lumin U1X streamer, till the thought of trying DSD upsampling in the Lumin hit me. Our forum member @muralimmreddy brought along his Gustard X-26 Pro for the experiment.
After feeding Tidal upsampled upto 192 khz to the Esoteric via a Hi-fidelity coaxial cable, we switched to the same tracks, upsampled to DSD 128 and fed to the Gustard via Murali's Tellurium USB cable. And there was a very noticable improvement in low level detail and clarity and the bass got firmer. Some of the bass bloat Ive been lately having, reduced significantly. Female vocals were sweeter and more focused. Though the sound stage width got reduced and centered in between the speakers, as compared to the Esoteric. Everything else was an improvement in my books.
Now this was not an apples to apples comparison for a few reasons, Linear-PCM vs upsampled DSD, Coaxial vs USB and different cables too. But it did leave me feeling that the Gustard was excellent , without even factoring what we could consider a reasonable price, going by the asking monies for today's state of the art Dac's.
And when I unplugged the Gustard, it was not even mildly warm to the touch, as we only played a few tracks. And as per the blurb on the net, those Class-A output stages run hot. So I would expect that we didnt even give the Gustard enough time to reach its ideal operating temperature, where as the Esoteric was running for almost 2 hours prior. So I expect that the Gustard had more to offer, had we had more time to spare. All in all, I was very pleased with the Gustard. And on the downside, Iam convinced I definitely need a new DSD Dac now.
Nativebon here.
I've had the X26 Pro with an U18 DDC for over a year now. Adding the U18 really opens up the sound stage and adds depth to the presentation.
Also just got a Puritan 156 power conditioner and this improved every aspect of the music.
Any sign of mush in the music all gone. Just a brilliant Dac.
