Gustard X26 Pro Balanced DAC Preview

Gustard is a China based electronics manufacturer, the R&D team have years of experience in audio products development, have been researching and developing the latest products in the audio fields. And its various audio products like DAC-X16, DDC-U16, C16 audio clock or H16 headphone amplifiers have have won wide acclaim in the China audio industry.

X26 Pro brief introduction:

It has been couple months since Gustard X26 was ceased production and now they are unveiling the updated version, Gustard X26 Pro. Compared with the previous verison, it get improved a lot. It not only adopts dual ESS9038pro DAC chips, XMOS XU216, and supports Bluetooth input. X26 Pro will support MQA full decoding via USB while it passes the certification, and you can download and update the latest driver to use MQA function by then. It is going for USD 1499.99, will be available for pre-order since Jan 28th.

The X26pro has a total of 6 input channels. ,you can select the current input channel in the order of COAX——AES——USB——IIS——OPT——BT. Bluetooth is equipped with CSR8675 chip, it supports Bluetooth 5.0, LDAC, AAC, SBC, APTX. And you can connect GUSTARD C16 or C18 to reference the 10M master clock via external clock input. As for the output, it provides two options which are XLR balanced output and RCA output. Here is a measurement of X26Pro from L7Audiolab.

As we all know, Digital filter is an important part in the design of modern high performance audio DAC system. The most important design purpose of digital filter is to achieve better audio quality performance by increasing and shaping the original digital audio stream signal. However, the DAC on-chip digital filter is limited to the limitations of cost and computing power, and its sound quality performance can no longer meet the requirements of our pursuit of higher sound quality.

Therefore, X26 pro focus on the Analog Device SHARC digital audio special DSP platform to develop it's own high performance digital filter scheme. This scheme is equipped with a self-developed high performance anti-aliasing noise algorithm, and the key digital signal processing links use high-precision floating-point 64bit operation. Reducing the aliasing noise in the digital domain audio band, that is, achieve better sound quality performance by upscaling and noise shaping the original digital audio stream signal.

K2 Synthesizer Synchronous clock implantation technology provides local femtosecond clock and external 10M clock frequency to synthesize the master clock, and then synchronize implantation and decoding. The front-end clock is discarded, and the DAC only uses a local femtosecond clock or an external thermostat clock. Therefore, the impact of front-end clock performance on the decoding link is greatly reduced, reducing the system's dependence on the performance of front-end audio equipment.

With built-in GUSTARD-K2, low noise clock synthesizer, it achieves femtosecond ultra-low jitter performance, and the precision of the synthesized audio clock reaches the ppb level. Benefiting from this, the master clock of the ES9038PRO decoder chip built in X26pro is also controlled by the K2 high-precision lock synthesizer, which directly works in super-synchronous mode to synchronize ASRC re-sampling, and USB IIS AES coaxial optical fiber Bluetooth can also enjoy the improvement brought by local femtosecond or external 10M clock.

Product specifications

Sample rate supported by digital input channels:

COAX ：PCM 16-24bit/44.1-192kHz；DSD DOP64
AES ：PCM 16-24bit/44.1-192kHz；DSD DOP64
OPT ：PCM 16-24bit/44.1-192kHz；DSD DOP64
USB ：PCM 16-32bit/44.1-768kHz；DSD DOP64-DOP256；NATIVE DSD：DSD64-DSD512
IIS ：PCM 16-32bit/44.1-768kHz；DSD DOP64-DOP256；NATIVE DSD：DSD64-DSD512
BT Bluetooth 5.0 : PCM LDAC, AAC, SBC, APTX, APTX LL, APTX HD and other high frequency encoding, LDAC can achieve 24B / 96K high code transmission

* USB input supported operating system：WIN7 SP1/WIN8/WIN10 32-64bit；macOS；Linux

Analog output performance：

Amplitude frequency response：20-20kHz /+-0.1 dB
DNR： >128dB
Crosstalk：-140dB @ 1kHz
THD+N：<=0.0001% @1kHz
IMD：<0.0006% @-1dBFs
RCA Output level：2.5Vrms (VOLUME 00dB)
Output impedance 100 ohms
XLR Output level：5Vrms (VOLUME 00dB)
Output impedance 100 ohms

Other specifications：
AC Power supply：AC 115V/230V 50/60Hz
Power consumption：<60W
Dimensions：Width 330mm * Height 65mm * Depth 260mm（Excluding protrusions）
Weight：7Kg (including packaging)