software "sound quality"

[mansr]

If it is merely reading lossless files from disk, uncompressing them, and sending the resulting PCM stream to the sound device, any correctly functioning software will "sound" the same. That said, getting a bit perfect transport to the DAC may require bypassing OS level mixing, resampling, and volume adjustment. Any serious audio player can be expected to handle this while things like web browsers probably do not, at least not with their default settings. A poorly written player may also be more prone to suffer from stuttering or drop-outs.

 

Playing lossy formats like mp3 is a different matter. The mp3 standard leaves some details unspecified, so different decoders can produce different outputs from the same input file. A low-resource decoder using 16-bit maths may well sound different from a better one using 32-bit precision. This isn't as much of an issue with more recent formats like AAC since they are better specified with less room for decoders to take shortcuts.

 

The bottom line is, sending the same data to the DAC should produce the same sound no matter what the software doing it is called.