Comments on Profile Post by ohshitgorillas

Are the SE outs and USB okay? My Gustard X16 is okay-ish as long as you don't use SE or USB. (AES in, XLR out is acceptable)

Haven't tried SE outs, and I don't have a USB source besides my computer which is unlistenable (tons of digital noise). If you're really interested I can swap my USBridge Signature over and try to compare it to the AES input but that's likely to be more of a comparison between streamers than it is an assessment of the Gustard's USB quality. Sorry.

Thanks. I wouldn't go out of the way to test, was more of a general curiosity.

SE outs sound fine through my Enleum, which only has SE inputs.

As far as inputs on the R26, I, personally, see no reason not to use the built-in streamer.

I don't do much in the of digital tweaking, but many reports on the web about the built-in streamer sounding good, so I haven't felt the need to AB.

The included streamer does sound good, but imo Pi2AES over AES/EBU has an edge with detail. LAN sounds a bit more smoothed over to me. Plus, I'm interested in eventually getting into oversampling via HQPlayer.

What did NOT make a difference was the Aune XC1. I can reliably tell the difference blind (testing myself) and using the Aune as a clock sounds very slightly more compressed. Come on man, you have ONE JOB.

I'll have to try again with the iFi Neo Stream, optical box and i2S out. That ought to be pretty good, too, but from memory I didn't hear huge differences and maybe even preferred LAN. But, then, I really dislike ABing digital stuff--find it maddeningly hard to parse--and my MacBook is too old to experiment with upsampling, etc. via Roon.