Player

Does foobar2000 sound better than other players?

No. Most of “sound quality differences” people “hear” are placebo effect (at least with real music), as actual differences in produced sound data are below their noise floor (1 or 2 last bits in 16bit samples). foobar2000 has sound processing features such as software resampling or 24bit output on new high-end soundcard's, but most of other mainstream players are capable of doing the same by now.
http://www.foobar2000.org/FAQ.html

I would like to present a minimalist GUI-less audio player for Windows Vista, which uses Vista's new audio WASAPI in exclusive mode, and with "Pro Audio" priority.

It loads the whole audio file into memory before playing.

The main feature of this player is that it does not have a GUI interface.

I intentionally do not do any gui for this player.

I strongly believe that any interaction with any part of the OS influences the sound.

Minimalist wasapi memory player

Once you get both direct sound and kernel streaming both working you might find the differences between players and even various plugins start to fade. Some audiophiles here have indeed caught audiophile nervosa when it comes to PC audio and hear the difference when they switch to a different color drive tray. I'm not saying there are not subtle differences between players in you do things RIGHT, but I am saying if you do things WRONG the differences then become VERY audible. To me, getting bit perfect playback gets you 90% of the way there, and after that you can tweak and compare to your hearts content.

Presto

The advantage to memory play is reduction of activity in the computer box during playback. Normally, data is read off of the disk into memory and then copied to the device, so there are two separate activities going on. With memory playback only copying data from memory to the device is happening. Ideally, the hard drive could be spun down as well, so there wouldn't even been any electrical and acoustic noise while listening to music.

The assumption is that less activity means a cleaner signal out of the computer box to the DAC. Whether this is true or not, and whether or not this affects the output of the DAC will depend on the specific system.

The primary disadvantage to memory playback is the time spent up front loading memory. There is also an extra cost of large amounts of memory, which will be measured in gigabytes when playing long hi-res playlists. For example, I have one double album that would require 5 GB just to hold the WAV file for the complete program.

Tony Lauck