A/V Foobar2000

I read that, but i hope Winamp does something to comethu this..
Not unless they already did, i don't know why they made a C version of 5.03..
Well Winamp did enhance Video quality in the 5.03..

 

I.. Holy ****. I can't believe you just used 'der'. This better be a ****ing joke.

PS - Digital is lossy, it's inaccurate, it only samples the waveform so many times a second, and amplification occurs on an analogue level anyways, you want quality and power, get a tube amp. Most computer speaker systems are simply a DAC, and an amp, a few high end ones will do signal processing, however most of that is done on the soundcard, making it redundant.

 

OK, enough's enough. This post is not only pointless, and possibly in the wrong forum anyway... but it's turned into a playground.

I'm not impressed with the name-calling. On either side of the member/mod divide

 

A good live recording is actually quite good a test of a hifi system, because live recordings often bring with them an extra ambience, the sound of the crowd etc.....stuff recorded in a studio is definitely a 'cleaner' sound, less distortion and so on, but if a recording is done properly with the right equipment and so on then theres no reason a live recording can't sound good. Some stuff needs to be heard as though it was a played live anyway....

As for this thing with foobar 2000 playback options, I tried it and there was no noticeable difference to sound quality, and I think I would notice the difference really since my hifi is pretty good, relatively speaking.

Increasing the samplerate in the software made no difference, the sound card was still outputting CD standard 44.1kHz according to its software (it will automatically jump to a higher sample rate up to 96kHz if I play back a file with that sample rate as default). Increasing the output data format from 16 bit to 24 bit or even 32bit didn't have any effect, I can presume it didn't work at all and its not changing the output data resolution, since my sound card can only output 24bit and my DAC can only take signals up to 24bit, yet setting it to 32bit fixed point it was still able to play....so its not doing anything for my setup to change the output data my sound card is sending out through the SPDIF.

Upsampling (i.e 44.1 -> 96kHz) can have benefits to the sound, if done well - you can buy various digital upsamplers for use in hifi, and some high end-ish CD players have inbuilt upsampling from 44.1 -> 192kHz (Arcam FMJ CD33T for one). Upping from 16 bit to 24bit doesn't work though - the only reason things like cd players use 24 bit DACs is for a greater precision when dealing with 16bit sources (CDs), there is no gain from padding out a source recording at a resolution of 16bits (like CD) to 24bits.