Slight correction to your post - when looking at their website today I see two models, the
dac8 PRO and the
dac8 Stereo. Both are digital input only.
The dac8 Stereo has 2 outputs and the dac8 PRO has 8 outputs.
It's a pity that there is not at least 2ch (stereo) analog input, but I suppose that increases the complexity. Is there a good solution for this that will not lead to clock mismatch problems? Without a wordclock output you cannot slave another unit's clock to the dac8 clock.
Also, I recall that at one time there was some talk about being able to implement some DSP inside the unit, but this was probably an earlier version. Not sure if this is possible now. Otherwise it is a fancy and good sounding 8-channel DAC but if you do not need AES-EBU input I am not sure why it would be superior to the TOPPING DM7, which is about half the cost. The Okto does give you volume control, but is that worth $600 more?
If this was a DSP unit with analog and digital inputs AND had the level of audio performance of the dac8 units I would be very interested.
My current solution does DSP in software under Linux, which can run on small and low cost mini-PCs. I pair that with some sort of DAC or DAC+ADC and I have a full solution including preamp features, input switching, virtually unlimited DSP, and I can stream the audio to multiple endpoints that remain very well synced by distributing a clock via NTP. It's an audio/loudspeaker/crossover swiss army knife! The only drawback is some latency, however, since the system is for audio only this is not a problem for me (low latency to match video content, movies, etc. is not required).