The sound of digital audio replay software

Has anyone else experimented with various software for replaying music from a hard drive on a PC?
I've tried a variety of them. Foobar is very easy to use and freeware. Various other similar systems are around of course...
I have found Adobe Audition to sound very noticeably better than any other software I've tried. All the others are very hard to tell apart to be honest!
The key seems to be that Audition seems to take the time to process and "decode" the FLAC or WAV data before you can play it, whereas all the others seem to do it "on the fly" I.E. when you click on a track to play back it does not just play it. It takes 30 seconds or so processing it during which time the usual blue bar moves across a small window until it is ready.
It has to be said that it is very awkward to use and if you just want convenience and ease of use then it's a non starter!! (it's pro audio recording and mastering software and not really designed to do a similar job to the likes of Foobar etc).
If sound quality is the main (or only) consideration though then it seems to be the best.... for me on my system etc anyway.... its improvement seems repeatable on any of my PC's though.
Any thoughts?

 

Do .wav files need decoding?

 

Good question. Audition still seems to take some time processing any type of format before playback though.
Very awkward to use also as the only way of playing back an entire CD seems to be to batch process it so it becomes, in effect, one long track... which of course means you can't then decide to jump to track 6 for example. You would have to move the cursor to the gap of the silence after track 5 on the screen.

 

Adobe Audition costs $350?

It damn well ought to sound better!

Think I'll stick with foobar...

Playing CDs on a computer, due to the way CD & DVD rom drives work is a pain, a noisy pain at that.

 

Yep it's not cheap.
I don't really use my PC for playing CD's. I play from the hard drive.

 

Audition is not a media player, it's a sound editor.

 

It's the only way to fly these days.

What about differences between foobar & Winamp?

I think foobar is better, but I can't see why it should be?

 

Yep, I said as much. That's why it's so difficult to use for this purpose.
I shall compare foobar and winamp and let you know.
It's hard to see why any should really sound different to any other as they are all just 1's and 0's! I reckon that AA does sound quite substantially better though.

 

My suspicion is that, if they use the same drivers for the soundcard they will sound the same. Different drivers can produce different results though. In my system if I do distortion tests using direct sound, I can see some artefacts which are not there using ASIO.

 

I'm using asio already and can still hear the difference.

 

Surely it depends on the exact codac the playback software uses rather than the software itself?

 

It depends on any number of things but at the end of the day if the software player has a bit perfect output then it can only be affected by jitter added to the signal due to bad clocking on the way off your pc. Potentially better software/drivers help reduce this by cutting any unnecessary background processes which might provide a better environment for the operation of the clock that feeds the output device.

PC's are noisy places and getting data somewhere on time isn't really in their remit, just getting the right data to the right place in the right order.

Codecs have nothing to do with playing back wav files, they are just raw pcm data in a wrapper, the pcm data is spat out via spdif/usb etc. Replaying anything else might be affected by the codec, but they should all provide the same value for the same data decode, any mp3 codec (version compatible) will give up the same music from the same data file.

There isn't anything else going out to your dac from your pc except data and time/code, embedded or implied so jitter is really the only option if your player is bit perfect.

 

Well Foobar doesn't whip the llamas ass like Winamp does!

At least for MP3:s, the standard doesn't define in detail how to encode them so there could be differences in how programs create mp3:s. The standard does however state how to decode them, so there are no differences to be had there.

It could be that if Foobar for example is setup to bypass Window's kernel mixer and Winamp is not, resampling is happening on the way and so the two players sound different. But this is down to setup really and not to the actual players as such. Also details like eq could be done in sufficiently different ways to produce audible differences in sound..

 

Just been trying another free one called VU player. Seems similar to Foobar all in all...

 

With the help of a friend, I did a blind test of winamp and foobar, I failed hopelessly!

Three correct identifications out of 20 when I didn't know which was playing.

 

failed? you succeeded! You proved that there is no difference.

 

The ironic thing is that if Basil had just tried guessing he'd have achieved 50% success rate (theoretically).

 

Have not tried blind testing of Audition against others but the difference seems fairly marked to me... All others do seem to sound the same though!
It would be interesting to know why Audition should be different?
BTW. I have no connection or commercial interest in Audition! Thought I'd better point that out as I'm coming across as a salesman for them

 

If it sounds different ti will be because it has some feature turned on that makes it sound different. I could go upstairs and try it, but what's the point, it has no special code to bypass the Kernel, so if it does sound different it's due to some digital processing.

When audition was written there was no way round the kernel without asio4all and audition doesn't use it.

 

"If it sounds different ti will be because it has some feature turned on that makes it sound different. I could go upstairs and try it, but what's the point, it has no special code to bypass the Kernel, so if it does sound different it's due to some digital processing.

When audition was written there was no way round the kernel without asio4all and audition doesn't use it."

I'm using Audition 3 which is I believe still the latest version. I am using it with ASIO.