Introduction

YULONG is an audio brand operated by the Shenzhen Yu Long Yun Electronics Co., Ltd., named after its founder and chief engineer, YuLong Zhang. YuLong has developed quite a reputation in the DIY audio world for his handmade DACs and amplifiers, putting his experience to good use starting YULONG in 2009, in collaboration with musicians and audiophiles just as much as other engineers. The goal behind every YULONG product is to put forth not necessarily the technically best measuring source, but rather one that people would prefer to use to listen with. This ends up being a double-edged sword, splitting the market into the objectivist and subjectivist camp, and yet one thing pretty much everyone seems to agree upon is YULONG products fare well enough to sit on many people's desks as a daily driver.


The vast majority of my audio source reviews here have been using an ESS DAC, owing to the AKM factory fire in 2019, and even there I have grown used to seeing the exact same transparent sound signature. It's great for when I need to take headphone/earphone measurements, but it also showed me how variety is indeed the spice of life. YULONG, with its latest desktop DAC/amp called the DA-ART Aurora—or simply YULONG Aurora as I shall henceforth refer to it, given DA-ART is a sub-brand of YULONG—continues down the ESS train but once again claims there is more here than meets the eye. I was accordingly intrigued, especially given my lack of experience with the brand, and agreed to cover the product. Thanks to YULONG for providing a review sample to TechPowerUp, we begin with a look at the product specifications below. Be sure to click the image twice to fully open it and go through all the details.

Specifications