To belabour the obvious, USB bridges from Singxer and Soundaware then LHY have been part of my component vocabulary for a long time. I initially brought to this category an attitude most foul. Why couldn't makers of costly DACs improve their bloody USB transceivers and render external better versions redundant? But eventually the Zen memo—it is what it is—dropped. If the U26 tells us that to be effective mandates its real estate of parts, the R26II's identical chassis would need to grow twice as tall to house the resultant double-decker build. I don't know whether that's the actual takeaway. It's just how my mind rationalizes it. The flipside is audiophile hell of outboard everything. Now each stereo circuit module gets its own mono chassis with external power supply. At its most extreme, a premium DAC from the likes of CH Precision or Wadax could end up as 16 boxes because all went dual mono, from the digital input section to the upsampler, D/A conversion stage and output stage each with its own external PSU. Add an external ground box with drain leads to each. The rat's nest of wiring becomes farcical. If a music lover walks down that path, it's no wonder that for many, desire for a one-box smart FutureFi integrated with wireless networking becomes irresistible in the end. Here we might say that appreciation for—or acceptance of—a burgeoning box count ties to one's audiophile station in life. Availability of upgrade funds and whether one sells/buys or only buys factor too. To improve it, do we add to what we already have? Do we replace it with something better? Hifi classifieds of used stuff commonly list at 50% off retail. Replacing carefully used kit with new stuff can be lossier than MP3. Suddenly adding seems more sensible. That this can get out of hand if practiced repeatedly is clear. We're back at our audiophile station in life. How far along the path of complexification are we? What makes sense for my context and wallet could be senseless in yours. Obviousness. Belaboured. End of.

Pre-Mac are twinned LHY network switches at the end of 20m CAT8a off the router. Post-Mac is a Singxer SU-6 forwarding AES/EBU to a Sonnet Pasithea DAC. The iMac runs Audirvana Studio like my office PC.

Being on the local area network for hardwired cloud files, my main system too prays to my holy trinity of PCfi heaven: pre care on the LAN, post care on USB and audio-optimized player software in the PC or Mac to bypass sound processing in the vendor's OS. Old dog, same old tricks. But why let the tail wag this dog if it ain't broke?

Like a dog with a bone, my adherence to this scheme doesn't let go with this upstairs system either. Without Internet–hardwiring would require ~50m Ethernet carefully dressed up a turning staircase then down a 5m corridor and across a room–the LAN half of my recipe isn't necessary. There's only post-transport care with an I²S-capable USB bridge powered by super capacitors. The FiiO R7 transport bypasses its internal SMPS with an external PSU. Now you've seen my three play stations for the U26. From Gustard R26II to Sonnet Pasithea to Cen.Grand DSDAC 1.0 Deluxe, the price ceiling for my converters hits ~€6K. Should the U26 do anything for a €20K DAC? You know my thoughts on that. Would it on my lot? My USB bridges improve all of them. Whilst the LHY UIP and Singxer SU-6 cost less than the Gustard, this Soundaware D300Ref was ~€2'850 when I got it 8 years ago so nearly thrice what the Gustard asks in 2026. Context. It matters. For more, Sandu Vitalie of SoundNews reviewed the U26 on three different DACs: a ~€2K Eversolo Z10, a ~€3.5K Audiobyte Supervox and a €9.5K-26K Rockna Wavedream depending on version. In said sequence, he quantified his improvements with the Gustard as stepping from 40% to 20% to barely noticeable. He also found the U26 superior to LAiV's DDC, the Musician and Denafrips Phoenix and Gaia and wildly superior to my Singxer SU6. Of the ~10 DDC he reviewed over the years, the Gustard struck him as clearly the best so not by a small margin. My inner dog was drooling.

Here's the final tease: 80'000µF filter capacitance; twin TO-3 metal-encased 60V/15A transistors as voltage regs; twin metal-enclosed rectifier bridges capable of 800V reverse voltage, 25A rectified current and 400A surge capability; and a 50W toroidal power transformer with 10V/2.7A secondaries. It seems like quite serious ammunition to throw at a wimp job of USB isolation and reclocking. 'Winning means working harder' might be the takeaway? About their K2 PLL, "it effectively decouples the decoding process from the source clock to suppress the negative impact of high-jitter sources. It synthesizes the required master clock from either the onboard OCXO or an external 10MHz clock. It generates dual low-phase-noise clock signals at 98.3040MHz and 90.3168MHz with extremely low loss to ensure precise timing for various audio sample rates." Via I²S, our DAC needn't extract a clock from a multiplexed S/PDIF stream because it transmits on its own dedicated line. Now for the mental block which disputes that digital-domain processing that's not up/resampling could do anything audible. The most common reason given is more effective noise stripping. That presents our downstream D/A conversion with a cleaner signal for superior results. It's the less and least significant bits which get most compromised by noise. Hence we'd expect the main benefit to be better low-level resolution. That tends to transmit as superior ambiance retrieval; more timbre differentiation in the faintest upper harmonics; clearer depth cues for better layer articulation; and more microdynamic contrast. In short, improvements in dimensionality, tone, soundstage sorting and expressivity. We also recall the early days when CD players split in twain. Then we learnt that overbuilt transports from Esoteric and CEC made noticeable differences despite protests that the format's error correction should render that impossible, hence a PC's CD ripper be all that's required. Today's digital transports and DDC continue the tradition. This stuff is far more finicky hence responsive to extra care than common sense credits. 

… to be continued…