Best reviews of 🧨 GUSTARD – DAC-X26 Pro 💯

Sporting a meticulous design and a sensible layout, the GUSTARD X26 Pro embodies high-quality workmanship and strong materials. Each channel of the GUSTARD X26 Pro has a flagship ESS ES9038 pro decoding chip with an independent power supply and grounding for outstanding performance. The high power requirement of the ESS ES9038 pro decoding chip is met by the Hybrid discrete IV conversation circuit and independent parallel circuit. The analogue low pass filter fully discrete Class-A circuits are fine-tuned specifically for the ESS ES9038 chip.

For the primary clock, the GUSTARD X26 Pro uses a local femtosecond clock or external 10M constant temperature clock source. This minimises the effect of front-end signal source clock performance on the decoding link. All the digital inputs including the USB, IIS, AES, Coaxial, Optical and Bluetooth get the advantage of the synthesizer.

Every discrete device is dedicated to its performance and is flexible in nature. Each parameter at any given level can be adjusted easily to get the best performing results. These parameters can be further developed and controlled to avoid distortion while providing multiple variable sound styles to different decoding architectures. One of the disadvantages of discrete devices is that the parameters have influence, and are difficult to design and debug. To tackle this a specific technical experience along with an extended debugging process is required. Due to the weak consistency, the use of sophisticated materials is necessary.

The fresh design module adopted for the GUSTARD X26 Pro consists of an ARM microprocessor, high capacitor memory, DSP processor, Bluetooth chipset, XMOS XU216, CPLD programmable chip. There are self-constructed digital integrated circuits with logic functions, clock management, 2nd PLL, digital shaping, DOP decoder, PCM / DSD depop switch and other exclusive technologies that lay a strong foundation for exceptional sound quality. The USB interface of the GUSTARD X20 PRO uses an XMOS XU216 chip to support PCM768K DSD512 full MQA decoding.

The high-performance digital filter solution used in the GUSTARD X26 is developed on the Analog Device SHARC digital audio dedicated DSP platform. The unique function of this is a self-developed high-performance anti-aliasing noise algorithm. It uses high-precision floating-point 64-bit operations to eliminate aliasing noise to get better sound quality performance which is done by upscaling and noise shaping the original digital audio stream signal. You get 3 modes under PCM: Vivid, Composite & Gentle while the NSOS function is available in two modes: No digital signal sampling mode or direct analogue conversion of the original signal.

Powered with the CSR8675 chip, the GUSTARD X26 Pro extends support to Bluetooth 5.0 along with audio codecs like the LDAC, AAC, SBC and APTX. Moreover, two high-quality audio dedicated toroidal transformers equipped in the X26 Pro supply power to digital and analogue circuits separately keeping the power supply independent and free of mutual interference. There is an independent multi-stage voltage regulator to ensure that the right and left audio channels are perfectly separated avoiding any kind of interference.

With the X26 Pro, you get XLR & RCA digital outputs along with optical, AES, IIS-H, coaxial, Bluetooth and USB digital inputs. While the GUSTARD X26 Pro adopts IIS-H ultra-high specification digital interface, it does not connect to the usual HDMI as it cannot be used with the HDMI interface of the TV. Within 10 seconds of use, the brightness settings will be automatically remembered by the GUSTARD X26 Pro. The brightness of the X26 Pro’s screen is adjustable and it remembers the last setting and leaves space for humanized operation control.