A essayer avant de changer d'ampli ou d'enceintes !
Avant d'intégrer le Gustard DAC X16 à mon système je ne m'attendais pas à un tel bon en avant. En comparaison de mon Oppo 105D utilisé seul jusque là pour la lecture des CD et SACD, l'ajout du Gustard à transformer radicalement la restitution. Basses plus profondes, medium-aigu plus soyeux, tout est plus fluide comme si la musique coulait de source. Une sorte d'évidence sonore avec une belle aération. On se retrouve clairement dans un autre univers sonore. Tout est plus intelligible. En connexion SPDIF sur RCA c'est déjà très bien, malgré quelques sibilances et une présence parfois excessive des aigus. En sortie IIS sur HDMI, là tout devient parfait, tout le medium-aigu est beaucoup mieux intégré, plus doux et soyeux, comparable à l'analogique (disque microsillon). Aucune agressivité. Je ne saurais donc que recommander ce DAC. Quelques précisions : pour pouvoir utiliser l'entrée IIS sur HDMI j'ai dû compléter le DAC avec l'interface HDMI dédiée aussi vendue sur Audiophonics. Un mot aussi sur les filtres en termes de perception subjective : le H-Fast tend à donner plus de présence aux hautes fréquences. Le L-Fast est plus équilibré, le M-Slow est celui que je préfère et tend à légèrement accentuer le secteur médium. Intéressant sur des enceintes compactes 2 voix. C'est juste mon ressenti, mais cela ne correspond pas vraiment à ce qui en est dit dans le manuel utilisateur.

Top product
In combination with my Bluesound node 2i the sound is more detailed , transparent, combined with quality cables , you have a cracking combo with an exceptional value for money ratio , if the same product did have the name Gustard but some other well known European brand name easily the asking price could be over a 1.000 € , fast delivery and secure packaging from Audiophonics bravo for providing such quality products

Terrific dac!
I couldn't wait for the black version to be in stock so I ordered the silver one. As always (thnx Audiophonics!) a fast delivery to the Netherlands to a pick up parcel shop.

About the Gustard:

I wanted a balanced dac to feed my power amp (QSC PLX2402, yeah, home use ;-) Other candidates were dacs from Topping (DX7Pro, DX7s) and SMSL (SU-9) but the X16 had my attention right from the start. Differences in SQ are small and I like the looks of the Gustard best.

Used with foobar and some dsd components eveything is upsampled to dsd512 and the listening experience is terrific. Build quality is great also. Nice to see Gustard added a good usb cable. Don't see that often.

Highly recommended!

An excellent DAC for the price.
Listening each more music from streaming services, liked TIDAL I was missing the new MQA versions and also, still shy though, the growing DSD format. Thus I decided to get a new DAC, to replace my already older but excellent Nuforce DAC-9, without investing a lot of money. After a long search I’ve decided to get a Gustard DAC-X16, a very difficult choice among many brands like Topping, S.M.S.L, Audio-GD, Denafrips, etc., which offer you a ton of features for a quite low price. The choice was based mostly on technical specifications and some audio reviews (not much, as the X16 is quite new).

From my first impressions, compared to my older DAC, it’s clear this is a more resolving DAC, with better dynamics and a wider and deeper sound stage, thus imaging gets a little improved with some instruments floating around de stage. These qualities increase when listening to the same music in MQA and DSD format, were the information about the ambient of the recording, like acoustic recordings in Churches and Chambers, are better reproduced, transporting you to the action place. Comparing the sound using coaxial and optical inputs on both DACs, overall there is an improvement but not a dramatic change, the DAC-9 still a terrific machine! However, when both driven by the USB port, the difference for the X16 is much more evident, as the DAC-9 has a quite outdated USB controller, not able to cope in the same way with the digital stream (recent developments improved and solved many of the problems with noise and jitter from computer USB connections). This difference was already notorious just by comparing both optical inputs and coaxial on DAC-9, with the USB input loosing detail and having a shadier sound. Overall, the biggest difference between X16 and DAC-9 is a shift in to the warmth side of vocals, with a little emphasized bass contributing to a full-bodied vocals, without losing details.

For example, if a use an audio sample with white noise, there is a clear difference in the highs in benefit of Nuforce DAC-9, with much more gain and hissing. Wonder which device is more flat in the audio spectrum, but I would guess DAC-9 is exaggerating in the upper top (I say this, because sometimes the sibilance’s of voices can be quite pronounced, as if the singer was spitting at our face, literally!!). If however I select in the amplifier the correspond input, without any music reproduction (be careful), and increase the volume to the limits of the amplifier, there is an audible hiss coming from the DAC-9, while from the X16 just a dead silence (this was done with balanced outputs). Amazing this rejection of noise in the X16 outputs.

The source used for the testing was a Raspberry Pi 4 with a HiFiBerry Digi+ Pro board for better digital quality through coaxial and optical outputs, running Volumio (Virtuoso subscription), using local samples files and TIDAL. Unfortunately the MQA streams some times are not correctly identified and play as normal PCM files using optical and coaxial inputs. Could also be a problem with Volumio, as to get DSD proper flagged I need to select DSD over PCM – DoP, but no option for MQA. Off course DSD is limited to DSD64 on these inputs. Thus, to fully assess the potential of MQA and DSD, the USB output was used most of the time.

Among the accessories, a remote, a USB cable, a power cable and an anthem, together with a guarantee card (with serial number). I nice touch.
The delivery was quite fast and the package came very well protected.

In conclusion, for those who want to extract the most of the recording, without going in to analytic and fatiguing side of the music, this DAC is an excellent choice for the price payed!

Sehr guter Dac
Sehr schneller Versand nach Deutschland, dafür schon mal die volle Punktzahl.

Der Dac funktioniert und kling fantastisch!!
Sehr gut verarbeitet, fast wie ein Tresor, besser gehts fast nicht.
Er wurde von meinem Raspberry 4 mit Moodeaudio sofort erkannt und spielt auch MQA Dateien problemlos ab.

So das wars, bin sehr zufrieden.