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Review and Measurements of Gustard DAC-X26

lichie

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Amir, why are you ignoring the somewhat poor jitter measurement here? If this dac had lower SINAD, I feel you would not have gone so easy on it. It may be mostly below -150db (which IS impressive), but it has many irregularities and significant sidebands.

Also, the jitter chart has a large portion of data covered by the watermark. Could you fix that please?
 

GeekyBastard

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Thank you. Does anyone know why a company that does have such a good dac doesn't even have a website?
That is so weird.
They clearly mean bussines.
Gustard is a rather small brand in China, it's more like a DIY shop rather than a big company, they only got a Taobao shop online, it's https://gustard.taobao.com/

BTW, You'd be surprised how many Hi-Fi gears in China were made by fresh graduates, as far as I know, Khadas was started by a bunch of young people too.
 

tpaxadpom

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Amir, what digital input did you use for feeding stimulus signals into DAC? I saw USB being mentioned in the first chart, but it is unclear for the rest of them.

I will be happy to run measurements on AP, if someone wants to ship me a random unit. This way we can eliminate any bias.
 

tired_guru

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excellent. I hope they have a very good QA and small variations from one unit to the next. I can’t help but think they sent you @amirm a hand-picked unit just for the sake of this review.
That's why I stopped reading when realised "THEY wanted to send the unit in for testing". This should be never accepted by amir. Only random units from random users.

Still want to believe this is great company. Having a look at the inside, there should be not so much for tinkering/tweaking and very high
repeatability so there is a great chance they sent amir just standard unit, maybe with just better QC. All SMD, great PCB design probably many, many layers to achieve this level of performarce with a lot of great know how & engineering behind.

Still NO JITTER test on toslink input to check if there is some extra fifo buffer reclocking samples (see a lot of fpga / dsp chips on both sides of PCB)
 
Last edited:

tired_guru

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Headphone users are in luck with likes of Massdrop THX AAA 789 and JDS Labs Atom.

index.php
Especially with JDS ATOM when you can easily use full output of gustard in great low gain performance mode of ATOM, without chance of clipping here and still having quite high Vrms on the output for headphones (without need of activating voltage gain stage of atom which reduces the overall performance of the headamp significantly -> see amir's test for high gain).
 

headwhacker

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That's why I stopped reading when realised "THEY wanted to send the unit in for testing". This should be never accepted by amir. Only random units from random users.

Still want to believe this is great company. Having a look at the inside, there should be not so much for tinkering/tweaking and very high
repeatability so there is a great chance they sent amir just standard unit, maybe with just better QC. All SMD, great PCB design probably many, many layers to achieve this level of performarce with a lot of great know how & engineering behind.

Still NO JITTER test on toslink input to check if there is some extra fifo buffer reclocking samples (see a lot of fpga / dsp chips on both sided of PCB)
Maybe someone here who has this DAC can send this to @amirm to provide another sample. My impression with Gustard so far is they produced knock-offs when they produced the clone of Violectric V200. However, if I see a few other samples that measures the same as the unit in this review, then it really is impressive.
 

maxxevv

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My impression with Gustard so far is they produced knock-offs when they produced the clone of Violectric V200. However, if I see a few other samples that measures the same as the unit in this review, then it really is impressive.

Which model would that be ??
 

Shadrach

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I can believe they may have made say 10 units and picked the best measuring to send for review.
I find it hard to believe they would deliberately make one unit perform better for a review than the units they put up for sale.
How much trouble and effort would it take to get the what is usually small and often inaudible improvements in a design without making major changes to such things as the circuit board and components.
If they did do a redesign and found it performed better, they may as well make the altered unit the production model; the bulk of the cost and work has already been done.
I think electrical units such as this DAC may well have a range of performance levels. The nature of componant tolerances and non critical manufacturing faults make this inevitable.
Anyway, it's a good DAC, but it's still overpriced on the performance stakes compared to it's nearest competitors.:p
 
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amirm

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Amir, what digital input did you use for feeding stimulus signals into DAC? I saw USB being mentioned in the first chart, but it is unclear for the rest of them.
All measurements are USB unless specified otherwise.
 
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amirm

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That's why I stopped reading when realised "THEY wanted to send the unit in for testing". This should be never accepted by amir. Only random units from random users.
You are welcome to ignore such reviews. Personally I much rather have this kind of data than no data.
 
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amirm

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Still NO JITTER test on toslink input to check if there is some extra fifo buffer reclocking samples (see a lot of fpga / dsp chips on both sided of PCB)
I plan to do a deeper dive into its filters and PLL circuit at a later time.
 

maxxevv

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It is ? Doesn't even look remotely alike except at the back though. The front panel layout is completely different from the V200. Sure you got the right amp ??

I really don't see how can they be considered clones ? The 10 capacitors in the center are not even in the same sequence.

V200 front
Violectric-V200_front_black-960x430.jpg

H10 front
MD-7186_20150423112753_150ee5c8aa11d186.jpg

V200 rear
Violectric-V200_rear-960x430.jpg

H10 rear
1879599-gustard-h10-highcurrent-class-a-headphone-amplifier.jpg

When you actually look at the internals, they are very, very different actually:

v200.jpg 2016-06-02_574fcffe19192_H10Old.jpg
 

maxxevv

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I can believe they may have made say 10 units and picked the best measuring to send for review.
I find it hard to believe they would deliberately make one unit perform better for a review than the units they put up for sale.


That would be far more plausible than the other conspiracy theory being thrown around.
 
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