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Textbook

Posted by Dawnrazor (A) on January 12, 2009 at 13:26:19

In Reply to: RE: Or get the clock out of the PC posted by Jim F. on January 12, 2009 at 08:15:11:

Hi Jim,

YOu have a very Textbook argument here. I just don' think it bears out in reality.

It sounds pretty good, and while I have not spent any time
comparing playback software (I use Foobar -- either
0.9.5 or 0.8.3, with their respective ASIO DLLs),
I have no reason to believe that the "brand" of player
software could have any possible effect on this arrangement
(unless, of course, I were getting glitches, which I'm
not. My music is on an external disk drive in a
Firewire enclosure, and I keep it defragmented. It's
also a 1TB drive, with a pretty big buffer -- what
are they, 16 MB these days? And Foobar seems to do
a perfect job of decoding WavPack lossless on the fly.)

Here are a few tests that you can do. ASIO versions do definately change the sound. If you can find some of the old Otochan Foobar ones you can easily test this. If not, Go get the latest version of winamp and listen to the Budde asio and otochans and even the different versions of otochans sound different.

The program also makes a difference for some reason. One is reading from memory vs. HDD. Try comparing foobar vs Wavelab. SOme say even using foobar as a memory player doesnt come close to some of the better players, which all seem to have lame guis.

WHat I notice on the better players is that the imaging is much more precise, and players like Foobar aren't nearly as strong in this regard.

cPlay is one of the best players, so is wavelab. I hate that because while it sounds better than Foobar and winamp, etc. the gui is unuseable for playback.

However, in all of these cases (where the clock is not at
the mercy of the computer's electrical environment) I would
expect the sound quality (barring any gross anomalies,
dropouts, etc.) to be independent of the player software
running on the PC.

That makes sense Jim and I just might add a clock to my Lynx and then listen, but what is interesting is that Alan Kafton is one of the big proponents of the software being crucial. Yet he has one of those pro Firewire dacs with the great clocks (Rme Fireface 800) out of the computer, and still hears differences with players.

So what players have you compared??

Here is one informal comparison I have done, and while things have changed (I am now focusing on Winamp and cPlay and will use one of them) I don't think the sound of the player has really changed (except for winamp. The Otochan ASIO takes this to another league IMHO).

• http://db.audioasylum.com/cgi/m.mpl?forum=pcaudio&n=30823&highlight=tier&r=   (Open in New Window)

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