Introduction

Shenzhen Geshide Electronic Co., Ltd., or simply Gustard as popularly known is an Asian audio company that focuses on the R&D and production of Hi-fi audio equipment. In particular, its DACs have been getting notorious acclaim among audiophiles for both headphones as well as speaker systems, often rivaling products from more established western brands that cost several times more. Gustard also complements these DACs with streamers, external clocks and headphone amplifiers, among other things. Two recent such DACs that caught my eye were the R26 R-2R DAC and the newer A26 that uses the excellent AKM AK4499EX we saw recently in the TOPPING E70 Velvet.

Given that I was already impressed with what a single AK4499EX did and knowing that the Gustard A26 uses two of them in a custom design architecture with a lot of upgrades along the way, I was highly curious to see what it was capable of. The A26 also manages to add in a network streamer to the feature set similar to what we saw before with the FiiO R7 and iFi Pro iDSD Signature, albeit it does this while looking like it belongs in any audio setup in any room and uses a simple “Roon Ready” implementation to make things easy for the customer. Thanks to SHENZHENAUDIO for providing a review unit to TechPowerUp and we begin with a look at the product specifications below, so be sure to click the images twice to fully open it and go through all the details.

Specifications