Newk, I'd be extremely interested in your impressions of cmp/cplay vs. foobar or J River or similar without any upsampling ...
Trying to understand what folks ascribe to the players' implementations themselves
It's going to take some days to get some ripping and testing done, but I can give you some preliminaries. I use Foobar and run the music stream to the Off Ramp unmapped and with Directsound, but ASIO will be necessary with cPlay. I can't have an
absolutely dedicated music server for the time being, so I won't be using cMP with cPlay. My music server is doing a few other mild Windows chores while it's playing music. I expect the memory player aspect of cPlay and the newer version of the Secret Rabbit upsampler to make a difference over Foobar playing lossless formats.
I've been using the latest versions of Foobar and its compatible Secret Rabbit upsampler (not the latest SRC). I'm fully convinced that upsampling Redbook and the like is very beneficial, at least in my system, but this goes along with what other trusted people say about upsampling. When the Off Ramp arrived I loaded Foobar 0.8.3 and the SRC upsampler provided by Steve. While I was trying to find the right synergy I reloaded the current Foobar setup. I intend to go back to 0.8.3 at some point. I have to have Foobar as an alternative to cPlay because I listen to a lot of DI.fm Ambient (ambient electronic music) which is 256kb MP3 net radio. I was very surprised to find that much of my criticism about MP3 stopped when I got a critically proper amount of jitter out (the Off Ramp) ...out of the way of higher bitrate MP3 codecs. It's not lossless to be sure, but getting the jitter out of it made a huge difference in clarity, focus, and spatial projection like it did in the lossless formats. I think there are a lot of people who are wrongly judgmental when they don't really know what
getting the jitter out does to a decent audiophile system. That said, I don't have a dream system but my components and interconnects are modest, truly high resolution modern parts. I know it's working right because the sound is
in the room and well defined, not just coming from the speakers. It passes "the cat test"... because the sound sometimes gets his attention and he looks around for birds (or whatever) he thinks are in the room. That's fun to watch. My consumer grade home theater system has never done that. Anyway, I say all that to qualify my observations about sound quality.
I loaded JRiver Jukebox recently hoping to find a better alternative to Foobar. It has feature advantages but its upsampler settings didn't make magic like Foobar with Secret Rabbit running
in my system, YMMV. I did quite a bit of reading and JRiver looked to be the only decent alternative to try against Foobar considering reputations for sound quality. It's apparent I'll be sticking with Foobar and the compatible Rabbit upsampler for all things not WAV or FLAC, those formats will hopefully be going to cPlay.
I am a firm believer that different software players can sound different. Anyone wanting the absolute best available (with deep pockets) should look toward using a Mac and Amarra in the front end and the best high resolution audiophile components you can afford. This was recently proven at the Computer Audiophile Symposium in Berkeley, California. I was surprised Steve didn't attend. A lot was proved one way or the other.
- Rand
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