I know there's a few owners of this excellent dac on ASR and I'm wondering if anyone else is using an Okto Dac8 Stereo w/ HQPlayer 4 & laptop? If so I'd love to know how you've got it configured from one end to the other. I just got one this week and not the most digital savvy person on the planet, esp. with all the variables HQP adds and want to ensure I'm getting the most out of it. Already, w/o any fine tuning this thing absolutely slays the decent more budget friendly dac it replaced.
Windows laptop with a usb SSD containing flac files / Okto Dac8 Stereo connected via bog standard usb 2 cable / balanced Interlink cables between dac and Luxman L550Aii integrated.
Congrats on the purchase and welcome to ASR. If you’re playing FLAC files, you can set the Okto to Pure USB mode and then play the files from HQPlayer directly or via Roon with SDM in DSD256 native (not DoP) from Linux or Windows, or DSD128 DoP from MacOS. The developer of HQPlayer recommends the 5EC family of modulators for ESS chips, which is what the DAC8 uses. Normally you would keep the DAC8 volume at 0dB for DSD and adjust volume at a later stage, or else with the HQPlayer software volume dial. Make sure to leave at least -3dB of headroom in HQP for apodization when converting Flac to DSD.
Most other settings (including up-sampled PCM) will also sound great out of the Dac8. Compare different settings and filters, and see what you prefer. If you want to share listening results here, best to do a blind test to be taken seriously. In general, you can expect the people on this site to be more receptive to the benefits of things like like EQ and speaker placement, and much more skeptical of DSD, once you have a DAC as transparent as the Okto is. Some people here might also be curious to see measurements of the Luxman. It could be the weak link in your chain right now as far as transparency goes, but that’s just a guess on my part.
There’s a diversity of views about DSD, and I still haven’t come to a final conclusion myself. Partly because my partner has long COVID and is not willing to indulge me for the length of time it takes to turn knobs for a proper blind AB test.
