Media players
You need a program to browse your collection and select the songs you want to hear.
As these application comes with different codecs and drivers there might be audible differences between them.
A popular piece of freeware is Foobar. Its claims are very modest:
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
Others claim high-end performance due to using their software like cPlay or XXHighend.
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.
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.
If we assume that a media player is program having an interface allowing you to pick a song and send it to the OS audio, there is little reason to expect any difference in sound between them because OS audio=OS audio.
There are claims that even in this case they can sound different.
The reasoning is that any electrical activity going on inside the computer will affect sound quality. Probably because more activity=more disturbance of the DA of the sound card (jitter). RFI and PSU are often mentioned.
Often a bit more is done than sending a file to the audio device only.
Sample rate conversion (SRC) is a nice example.
The way DSP is implemented is crucial for the results.
You do have to choose your algorithms carefully, program it correct and very important, the variables used should have the right precision.
Roughly speaking, a 16 bits audio path is inadequate, any DSP will degrade de sound probably due to quantization error.
32 bits is fine, most major OS use it. The artifacts are small and probably not audible most of the time.
Best result needs a 64 bit audio path. A lot of pro-audio software uses this.
Even when doing many calculations (exactly what happens when producing audio) the precision is such that any artifact is well below the noise floor of top quality gear.
64 bits and still artifacts? Yes, everything on earth is finite. Analogue components don’t have an infinite precision, it ends definitely in the thermal noise. Likewise DSP has a finite resolution but as long as it remains below the (thermal) noise floor we won’t notice.
Drivers can make a difference too.
There are horrible examples of drivers incapable of delivering bit perfect output.
The fun about computer based audio is that you can simply try a lot for free.
Download Foobar or JRiver Media Center (my personal preference) and do a listening test, try different drivers, etc.
But don’t forget the ergonomics, it is the tool you will use to handle your audio.
Memory players
There is a strong believe in the computer audiophile community that any activity going on during play back has a negative impact on sound quality.
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.
If you want to give it a try, download the trial version of JRiver Media center.
You can very easily configure it to load the song in memory.
Win 7 Resource monitor is an excellent tool to watch system activity during playback.
