Setup and User Experience

Setting up the Gustard A26 is quite trivial given it can be used only as a DAC if you so desire. The basic minimum inputs thus would be from the power supply cable and a digital input such as USB which I would safely assume most people reading this review are going to do. If you plan to also use the streamer functionality of the A26 then you will need to connect this to a router/satellite/bridge for Ethernet connectivity over local network or Internet alike. The outputs are then based on what you choose to plug downstream in your source chain and I found myself primarily using the dual 3-pin XLR connections for a balanced output to my amplifier. I have not tried most of the other inputs here due to lack of compatible hardware but also time/interest.


Turning on the A26 via the switch on the back will light up the touch panel screen on the front although only the capacitive power button on the left will be visible at this point. This is a second power button that allows you to switch between on and standby mode to preserve power and also allow easier access to the unit from the front, which I do appreciate. With the A26 fully on you will notice a few initial clicks inside and then the rest of the display turns on including the brand logo and product name for a brief moment before giving way to the on-screen display. It detected automatically that my USB connection was in use although you can of course switch to a different input using the remote or the touch screen itself. The display will show, among other things, the current input channel, encoding format, sampling rate, and volume. The -/+ buttons on the left help with volume control (0 to -90 dB) by default but are also responsible for navigation in the menu which is accessible by a long press of the settings cog between them. A short press switches between the various inputs if you have multiple devices connected to the A26.


There are eight menu items in the settings menu on the Gustard A26, at least as of the time I write this review. The first one allows you to choose between six PCM digital filters—sharp roll-off (default), slow roll-off, short delay sharp roll-off, short delay slow roll-off, super slow roll-off (NOS-like), and low dispersion short delay filter. There are also two DSD filters in the form of narrow bandwidth (default) and wild bandwidth if you are accepting a DSD input to the DAC. Sensibly, the next option is to enable DSD direct to allow the A26 to pass through only the original DSD input signal to the decoding stage. There won't be volume control on offer at this point either and you will hear that aforementioned click inside one more time as the playback format changes from PCM (default) to DSD. Do remember to turn down the volume of the input before enabling this since the A26 now outputs max volume. This also means you need to make sure you have an amplifier that has volume control. The fourth menu option is simply to choose between the internal clock or an external compatible 10 MHz one. As I mentioned on the previous page, I personally recommend sticking to the already-good internal clock over an external one that may not work as well with typical PCM playback rates.


The Sound menu offers a choice between "Listening" and "Monitoring" modes as devised by AKM engineers. I couldn't really tell the difference between the two; I imagine monitoring mode is supposed to be even flatter a sound output? Either way I kept it on listening mode for the rest of my testing. The attenuator setting goes through auto/off/on and allows you to choose how the volume control would work. Auto is the default setting wherein analog volume control kicks in when under -24 dB, off keeps it digital the whole way and on enables analog control throughout. I found auto to be a safe default although using the A26 only as a DAC and/or streamer may well be better with full digital volume control (fixed voltage). You can choose to have an inverted phase behavior if your inputs are programmed that way, I left it non-inverted as usual. Lastly, you can change the screen brightness from dark/moderate/bright/auto-off/screen saver. Given this is an OLED display, I chose the default screen saver mode to avoid any burn-in issues.


Using the Gustard A26 with USB input in Windows 10 or 11 doesn't require any additional drivers, with Windows recognizing the device automatically. We see that the default firmware provides PCM playback options up to 32-bit, 384 kHz. The integrated USB encoder bridge comes in handy here, and all your favorite players will recognize the device in WASAPI (Windows Audio Session API) mode accordingly as seen above with JRiver and Roon, even if they don't identify the actual device. There should be equivalent drivers pre-configured in newer macOS builds too, but I am not familiar enough to speak on this front.


If you have a device that doesn't accept UAC 2.0, or even if you simply want to try other options, then the Gustard USB audio device drivers will be of interest to you. You can find the installer on this page but be sure to download the correct files for your version—international or Chinese domestic. The latest version at the time of testing was v1.41 (the USB drivers were v5.50), which seems to be the device firmware version itself, although I noticed that v1.42 came out a week later after I finished recording these files. It appears that the newer v1.42 firmware only seems to have some bug fixes but is otherwise functionally identical to v1.41 used here. Installation is trivial as seen above, and these drivers now allow you to make the most of the Gustard A26 within the Windows OS as well as with other products connected to the device as either input or output.



What it then does is, as with pretty much any other DAC using an XMOS bridge encoder, create a new output device in Windows while also providing access to the Gustard USB Audio Device Control Panel. Just be sure to set the format to 32-bit (or whatever else is preferred) and choose the ASIO (Audio Stream Input/Output) buffer size that suits your latency requirements—that's about it. With that done, go to your media player of choice. I demonstrated above with JRiver and Roon again and set the audio player to the same output. At this point, you can implement further tweaks, but those are player dependent. Note that these drivers also enable 24-bit playback in addition to the default 16-bit and 32-bit support in Windows.


At this point I decided to test the Gustard A26's streaming feature by simply disconnecting the USB cable, plugging in the Ethernet cable going from my WiFi router, and then making sure the A26 was on the same wireless network as my PC. There was no physical cable connecting the unit to my PC thus. Turn on the LAN input and now you will see that the A26 can be automatically used with Roon (and other such programs supporting UPnP/DLNA playback) under the "Gustarender" name as a network device. For those unaware, Roon is quite possibly the best thing you could have if you tend to go with local storage of music files over streaming. It's the best music organizer and player I've used to date, with a clean UI and fantastic PCM and DSD playback alike. There are some music streaming services supported by it too and the amount of useful information it provides on the music artists and their work also makes it easy to discover others that may be to your liking. Then there is also the part where you can set up your PC as a Roon Core (server) and use the mobile app on your phone to gain access to your files anywhere around the world with excellent DSP/EQ controls too. It's a paid monthly subscription (or lifetime) that may seem confusing given it does not actually provide you with music content but I started using it recently and have already discovered the benefits which include easy-to-use digital filters to customize the tonality of headphones/speakers etc. If you are interested to give it a try, you can use this link to get a free 30-day trial (I don't get anything out of it). Gustard is not a Roon Partner but the A26 is still a pleasure to plug-and-play here to where I dare say the LAN input is seriously underrated and possibly my go-to over even USB. I never noticed any difference in playback from either input, for what it's worth.

Audio Performance

Regardless of whether you use the streamer function or not, the Gustard A26 is a DAC at its core and thus you'd feed it to an amplifier thereafter. It could be integrated/power amps for speakers perhaps, or headphones amplifiers as I ended up doing. In fact, having realized quickly that any perceivable difference in DACs is easier to notice with electrostatic headphones, the obvious move was to use the dual 3-pin balanced XLR connection headed to the excellent Headamp Blue Hawaii Special Edition. E-stats are weird in that the heavy capacitive load and the high voltage bias make it easier to discern between amplifiers and DACs more than more typical dynamic driver or planar magnetic driver headphones, and indeed this is also where I could tell you that the Gustard A26 is the cleanest and best sounding DAC to me. Take everything I said about the TOPPING E70 Velvet with its single AK4499EX and a more budget-friendly implementation and you can just add in more superlatives here. The A26 presents an extremely flat response as expected and yet allows for a bit more body to the mids that allows the BHSE to work better in taming shouty e-stats. There's a bit more engagement across the board—potentially from ESS DAC fatigue—but with weeks of testing so far I found myself reaching out to the A26 as my DAC of choice even more so than the much more expensive iFi Pro iDSD Signature. At the end of the day I urge users to look at DACs primarily for features offered than any marketing talk about the sound. I got a clean background, excellent balanced outputs to my amp, and good features including a streamer functionality so that was enough for me.