Eversolo T10 Network Transport Review

Here’s our review of the new Eversolo T10 Network Transport:

Introduction

The most interesting thing about this new £2,000 streamer is something it hasn’t got. There’s no DAC inside it – unlike almost every other streamer, that means you can’t just plug it into your amp and hit play – it needs a separate DAC to turn the signal into sound. And it makes sense, as f you are the sort of person shopping for a £2000 transport, most likely you’ve already go a proper standalone DAC that you love. So when you look at something like the T10, you may think, what’s that kind of money actually buying? Is it the engineering itself or the software and the day-to-day ease of use?

Buy Eversolo T10 at Premium Sound — £1,999

Why a transport can change what you hear

So here’s the idea behind it. Most streamers try to do everything in one box – they pull the music in, and they usually convert it to analogue with a built-in DAC. The T10 quite happily skips that second half. It’s what we call a transport, and its whole job is to take your music -from platforms like Tidal, Qobuz or from a drive full of your own files – and pass it over to a separate DAC as cleanly as it possibly can. That’s the job.

Now, obviously that only makes sense if you’ve already got a DAC worth feeding, and at this level, that almost always means a proper standalone DAC, one you’ve chosen and spent real money on yourself, rather than one that just happens to be built into an amp. That’s why Eversolo have left it out, and put the money into the bits that actually matter for a transport instead. You might be thinking — if all the T10 does is pass the music along to your DAC, how can that effect the quality of the sound? And it’s a fair question, because on paper, the digital signal leaving this thing is identical no matter which transport it came from.

But here’s the part that’s easy to miss. A DAC doesn’t just take the digital signal and turn it into music – it’s quite sensitive to how the data actually arrives. The timing of it, and possibly the little bit of electrical noise that can slip through. If timing’s a bit jittery, or there’s noise leaking down the cable, your DAC has to work harder, and you can actually hear it. Get it clean and steady, and the DAC just relaxes and does its best work. So a good transport isn’t changing the music. It’s making sure it’s not the thing holding your DAC back.

The clock, and why it matters most

So we think that the fairest way to judge the T10 is pretty simple – how seriously does it take that one job? And when you look at where the £2,000 has gone, it’s all pointing at exactly the same thing.

Take the clock first, because on a transport, the timing really is the heart of it. The T10 uses what’s called an OCXO – an oven-controlled crystal, so it’s kept at a steady temperature and barely drifts – and Eversolo quote timing accuracy right down to the femtosecond. What that gives you is very low jitter, and low jitter is what holds the image steady, so you get a focused, three-dimensional soundstage rather than a slightly smeared one. It’s genuinely the biggest reason a proper transport like this pulls ahead of the streamer built into your average all-in-one.

If you’re someone who really cares about clocking, Eversolo have gone a step further – there’s an input round the back for an external master clock, taking 10 or 25 mgHz, at 50 or 75 ohm. Now, here’s why that’s actually clever – every digital component keeps its own time, and even a really good clock can drift ever so slightly – so when your transport and your DAC are each running their own clock, those tiny differences between the two turn up as jitter. But feed them both from a single master clock, and they lock onto the same reference – so the whole chain is working from one source instead of two that are almost, but not quite, agreeing. Most people will genuinely never plug anything into that socket, and the internal clock is already excellent on its own – but if you want to take a system all the way up to true reference level, that’s the door it opens. Eversolo have even got their own C10 Reference DAC on the way to do exactly that – no release date just yet, but it’s coming, so there’s room to grow into it down the line.

Power supply and internal isolation

The power supply is equally important –  at the heart of it is a big custom toroidal transformer wound with oxygen-free copper, feeding a proper linear power supply, with the noise floor sitting somewhere around twenty to thirty-five microvolts – so it’s very quiet. On top of that, the inside of the unit is physically split into sections – power in one, the digital circuitry in another, and the whole display tucked away on its own – so the noisier parts can’t interfere with the sensitive ones. It is something you’ll never actually see with the T10 sat on your shelf, but it’s a big part of what you’re paying for.

There is one thing worth pausing on, though – The outputs aren’t all created equal. The I²S – that’s on an HDMI-style socket – and the USB will both pass the full resolution, so DSD512 and PCM up to 768 kilohertz. But the coaxial, the optical and the AES top out at 24-bit/192. So if you want to get those top numbers out of it, you’ll want to be connecting over I²S or USB. If your DAC only takes TOSLINK or S/PDIF, don’t worry – it’ll still sound lovely – you’re just not getting the very highest figures. We believe it’s worth knowing before you buy rather than after, which is why we’ve included this in our review.

So whichever output you end up using, they’re all electrically isolated – so any noise knocking about on your mains or your network can’t just ride down the cable and into your DAC. There’s a 12-volt trigger in-and-out on there as well, so the T10 can power up and down in step with your amplifier – it’s a small thing, but a lovely one when the whole system wakes up together.\

Networking’s been given the same care. You get 2.5-gig Ethernet, dual-band Wi-Fi for when running a cable isn’t practical, and an SFP port for fibre. That’s a bit of an audiophile trick: run fibre into it instead of copper, and you completely break the electrical connection between the T10 and the rest of your network, so none of that copper-borne noise can find its way in. Most people will be perfectly happy on Ethernet, but if you’re chasing the last bit of quiet, the option’s sat right there.

The screen, app and streaming services

The rest of it is everything you’d hope for at this money. On the front there’s a big 8.6-inch touchscreen, with proper analogue-style VU meters, a spectrum display, and even a few ambient bits if you fancy them – a little campfire, a aurora lights-styled scene – which sounds a bit odd reading it on paper but genuinely looks lovely across the room. It’s now Roon Ready, so it slots straight into a Roon setup, and you’ve got all the popular streaming services like Tidal, Qobuz, Spotify, Apple Music and more, all searchable in one go rather than app by app. You’ve also got the Eversolo app on your phone that will mirror that whole screen over your network, so you can control everything on it from the sofa.

It’s an easy to use app – you can get gapless playback so albums flow the way they should, shuffle across your entire library, and you also have the option to upsample everything on the fly, up to sixteen times, which some listeners claim to smoothen out the sound a touch. There are two internal SSD slots taking up to 16 terabytes, so if prefer it, your whole library can live inside the box and skip the network altogether. And if you’ve still got shelves of CDs, you can plug a USB disc-drive straight in and rip them as WAV or FLAC files using the T10 – either to those internal drives or across to a NAS.

It’s also worth saying the T10 gives you a proper set of tuning tools, and they run across all of the digital outputs – there’s a full parametric EQ, high and low-pass filters, loudness and dynamic range compression, and even channel delay if you’re time-aligning things.

Room Correction

There is also one feature on top of that I do want to single out, because it’s done really nicely – the room correction, which Eversolo call Evotune Pro. It’s built in as standard, it’s completely free, and the best part is it all happens inside the one Eversolo app – there’s no second piece of software to mess about with, and nothing extra to buy. You run a quick measurement, it builds a profile for your room, and it’ll sort out a boomy corner without much fuss at all. The only thing to be aware of is that you’ll need your own USB measurement mic, and that’s not included – so just factor that in. But the feature itself won’t cost you a penny more.

Conclusion

So here’s the honest question all of that leads to — what is your £2,000 really buying? Because if you’ve already got a great DAC – which you probably do if you’re looking at the T10 -, the lift in pure sound quality from a transport like this is real, but it is subtle. Which means a big part of what you’re paying for isn’t only the clock and the transformer. It’s the software, that big screen, the app on your phone, the library sat on internal drives, the whole thing just being quick and easy to use on a day-to-day basis. I think you will agree that for a lot of people, that experience is worth as much as the final few percent of sound. The trick is being honest with yourself about which of the two you’re actually buying, because that’s what decides whether the T10 is worth it for you.

If this would be your first proper streamer, then honestly, it’s not the one for you – you’d be paying for a load of clever engineering you can’t fully take advantage of yet, and you’d have to buy a DAC on top of it. But if your DAC, your amp and your speakers are already sorted, and the streaming source is really the last weak link in the chain, then leaving the DAC out stops being a compromise. It becomes the entire point. Every penny’s gone into the clock, the isolation and a clean hand-off – and nothing’s been wasted on a converter you were never going to use.

Which really just leaves one decision: the T10, or the T8 that sits below it. The T8 comes in at £1,289, and the T10 comes in at £1,999 – so there’s around seven hundred pounds between them. What that extra gets you is the better clock, the external clock input the T8 hasn’t got, plus the larger screen and more storage. So if you know you’ll never run a master clock and you just want brilliant Eversolo streaming into your DAC, the T8 is a lot of transport for the money, and I wouldn’t try to talk you out of it. But if you want the very best front end Eversolo make right now -and the option to build out a full clock setup later -then the T10 is the one, and at least now you know exactly what that extra’s paying for.

And honestly, the best way to settle it is just to hear it. You’re very welcome to bring your own DAC down to our store, or use one of ours, and put it up against your current streamer using music you actually know well. Five minutes with it and you’ll have your answer. So that’s the T10 – a streamer that’s better because of what it leaves out, as long as you’ve already built the system to hear it.