Gustard U18 with Gustard R26 dac?

That would coincide with what several others said in that a better — and sometimes a much more expensive — HDMI cable made a slight improvement.  I’m definitely gonna give one a try at some point, and if you get any clearer picture down the road I’m all ears to what you find, and thanks a lot for the follow up!

@soix 

I do think there was a slight improvement with the DH Labs cable, but I was swapping out interconnects at the same time and haven't done any seriously listening with the two different HDMI cables.  I need to do that some time.

This is unrelated, but I got a new interconnect that I wanted to try with my SACD player.  I decided to a/b test the SACD play against my dac and streamer.  My son (a musician) and I both gave the edge to the SACD player. We both felt that something was off, so I checked the setting on the dac and the filter setting had somehow gotten changed from "fast" to "slow".  I changed it back to "fast" and we both felt that the edge now belonged to the dac/streamer.  Pretty interesting.  On the fast setting, you get more detail and bass is punchier.  Anyone listening to this dac on medium or slow is not getting the best performance out of it.

Great!  Thanks for the follow up and very much look forward to your impressions of the DH Labs cable. 

@soix

I've done enough listening now to feel safe saying the U18 was a worthwhile addition.  It's added a bit of clarity/detail and realism to what already sounded quite good. No additional harshness.

This is with the $15 Monoprice hdmi cable. I have a DH Labs cable on order. 

Nice!  Love to hear your impressions once it settles in. 🤞🤞🤞 And hey, if everyone’s grammar here was anywhere near as good as yours this would be a much more user-friendly place. 🙄

Nice grammar (mine). Lol. 

@soix

Well, I ordered one from Amazon. They have a 30 day return policy, so I can send it to back if I can't notice any improvement. I also ordered a monoprice cable 12 inches long. I might get the DH Labs cable if I like the U18. 

@soix

Thank you very much.  That's the information that I was looking for. 👍

I'll need to order a cable of some sort. All of the hdmi cables that I have are at least 6 feet.  

I added a Denafrips Iris DDC to be able to take advantage of the i2S connection in my Musician Pegasus R2R DAC. I honestly didn’t go in with high expectations and bought the Iris used so I could easily resell it if the improvement proved marginal, but it was far from marginal. Adding the Iris was on the order of doing a complete DAC upgrade — the noise level dropped so images popped more out of nothingness and the 3D soundstage expanded in all directions. And yes, ideally the HDMI cable should be 1 foot or less as the i2S signal degrades quickly over distance because it was initially designed only for internal connections within a component. As I was just dipping my toe in I bought a $7 cable from Monoprice mainly because it was available in as little as 6” length and I wouldn’t be out much if I sold the Iris, but as it was more than capable of conveying the substantial benefits I heard I haven’t felt the need to upgrade to date. I’ve read several people say they didn’t experience big improvements from spending a lot more on an HDMI cable for i2S so that may be at play, but if I did upgrade it’d be to the DHLabs HDMI 2.1 that gets solid feedback but still not too pricey. Here are the links to both cables in case it helps.

https://www.monoprice.com/product?p_id=13578

https://silversonic.com/products/digital-cables/hdmi-2-1/

Anyway, that was my experience going this route and I know several others here expressed similar results so I’d definitely say it’s worth trying. Hope this helps, and best of luck.