Subjective comparison of Software Music Player

[bluesman]

On 5/3/2020 at 7:58 PM, The Computer Audiophile said:

Wow! Someone still using Media Monkey!

 

No complaints from me, just hadn’t heard anyone discuss it for about a decade. 

Sorry I’m late to this party. I ranked MM 5th in my front end software comparison AS article back in October 2019.  It does a lot of things very well and sounds great. But as I recall, it doesn’t do DSD.  

[bluesman]

On 5/11/2020 at 7:40 AM, manueljenkin said:

I refrained from adding the full comparison of hqplayer only because my pc was incapable of using it

If your PC is incapable of using it, I don't understand how you made these observations:

 

"Hqplayer - it's as good as winyl in equivalent settings. But it's a lot more feature rich. Lets you try custom upsampling PCM or DSD conversion options and can help get a better stream to your dac than the internal digital filters which can sometimes be low fidelity in the DACs. Also lets you try high precision fir filter convolution for a usable high precision eq."

[bluesman]

22 minutes ago, manueljenkin said:

Well I meant that I was only able to use the lower precision filters without issues on my pc.

It might help us understand more about your observations and conclusions if we knew the equipment you used to make them. I may have missed it, but I don't see any description of your computer(s) and audio system(s) at all.  Could you please share some detail with us?

[bluesman]

You don’t identify some key pieces, and I’m a bit surprised that you heard such a broad spectrum of sound quality with the named products on that list.  Because the list is vague and incomplete, I hoped that identifying the unspecified pieces might shed some light on it.  
 

Sparks op amps are nice little $39 units, but they’re just discrete chips that don’t do anything by themselves.  What are they doing in your system - did you use them in the Fun?  
 

You don’t tell us what those “few other DACs and amps” are, and the Apogee DAC you do identify is limited to 24/192 - so you couldn’t get the most from many of the players you included without using a more sophisticated DAC.  And while the Apogee is very nice, it has enough 2nd harmonic product to be audible as added warmth despite a very flat measured frequency response (per multiple reviews- see Ken Rockwell’s measurements for confirmation). Your Shure ‘phones also add some bottom and mid bass, which combines with the Apogee’s SQ to be quite noticeable.  This combination will definitely color whatever it’s playing.
 

The Apogee only has an analog output designed for driving headphones, so I assume you didn’t run its output into the line input on the Fun.   So with what did you drive the Fun, which only has an analog input?