Gustard S26 streamer

[PolarisPrime]

The are selling the unit, but only taobao -official site and on ALIexpress. With the right coupons you can get it for 850 euro.
Not many clips and artiles though. and not for sale in the EU yet, but it is registerd. Audiophonics.fr

Any thoughts on the unit?

 

[qirex]

Man, they sure love putting toroidal power supplies into things that absolutely do not need them. You could run a decent speaker amp with that thing.

With so much of streamers usability being dependent on the software and integration with third party stuff I'd be wary of homebrew from a small company.

 

[Greenman]

With so much of streamers usability being dependent on the software and integration with third party stuff I'd be wary of homebrew from a small company.

Yeh, this would be my worry, the end user experience is completely dependent on the streamer software platform.

Man, they sure love putting toroidal power supplies into things that absolutely do not need them.

Again yes, totally agree, they seem to be boasting of 25A current capabilities! In a steamer with no significant dynamic current requirements and overall very low draw. For me a steamer seems a good candidate for a well implemented SMPS, with decent filtering etc. I suspect they have just put the same bits in as some of their dacs so I suppose you could say it saves design/test effort.

Having said that I have a couple of Gustard products and they work (and sound) excellently.

 

[PolarisPrime]

Yeh, this would be my worry, the end user experience is completely dependent on the streamer software platform.


Again yes, totally agree, they seem to be boasting of 25A current capabilities! In a steamer with no significant dynamic current requirements and overall very low draw. For me a steamer seems a good candidate for a well implemented SMPS, with decent filtering etc. I suspect they have just put the same bits in as some of their dacs so I suppose you could say it saves design/test effort.

Having said that I have a couple of Gustard products and they work (and sound) excellently.

Yes I am leaning now more towards the matrix element S because of not having a DAC and does have IIS, otherwise I could take a cheaper one.

 

[jbar2797]

If you just need a streamer to connect to your DAC, get a Raspberry Pi4, and install Ropieee image. Tuck the Raspberry Pi somewhere and run USB from it to your DAC. It makes my DAC a Roon bridge, Spotify connect, airplay for apple, uPnP, squeezlite, etc, etc. All for around $75 and no audible difference between these "audiophile" streamers.