$2000 Dac

My lived experience with the Gustard R26 is just "meh.". For an R2R it sounded to much like a Delta/Sigma dac. I'm enjoying my Pontus 15th very much. 

thanks for the blunt honest comment.

Thank God i dont need a new dac...

But sometimes and probably very often  the problem is not the dac so much but the way we optimize it or not...try to optimize before throwing money...

Anyway  i cannot gave any informed opinion about dac brand names  S.Q. / value... I love too much mine which serves my needs well... I tried to upgrade it once and i lost money...

For sure i cannot put on a low cost system a very costly dac especially if i cannot fault my low cost one...And no,  my system is not acoustically  low grade at all, low cost yes ....

Who in the marketing dept thought it was a good idea to name a company Garlubidor. Just a horrible name! IMHO of course haha. 

I had a PS Audio Directstream mkI which was modified to sound like more like the mkII. My experiences with DACs have been that I'm not that interested in the ESS chips as I seem to be sensitive to digital glare. I have a desktop dac/headphone am with AKM chips and I don't have any issue with it. As much as I liked the PS Audio, I felt that I had an older model which was no longer going to get firmware updates including apparently good ones that went to the mkII model. 

I saw the Hans and Steve videos on the Garlubidor Divinity and it sounded like something worth having at the far end of what I wanted to pay and that it would be my final solution for now anyways. One thing to note is that Hans' review has almost no description of the sound quality because he said that the Divinity sounds just like his reference Holo Cyan 2 except a bit better in the bass. Steve said that the sound is neutral and revealing with no glare which is really what I wanted. 

So, I haven't done any A/B testing between these DACs because I sold the PS Audio one before I bought the Divinity and I've never owned the Holo. Right now I'm running the DAC mainly for burn in trying to get to about 100 hours before I do regular listening. I have done a bit of listening to it and really like what I hear. It does remind me of the PS Audio but it might be even more revealing (can't really tell without a side by side). I think I noticed that the attack got a bit stronger once I put some hours on it but again, that is subjective and hopefully not imaginative. 

From what I've heard so far, I am quite happy with it.