I take your point. I also dislike misinformation and half truths, but for a what I thought was a reasonably casual conversation, I thought my comment was relatively in context and could be understood by readers to be a "reason" for my perception of the "better" sound of CMP. Anyway its been cleared up now.
Oh, I am not disputing that at all, it is very logical. It makes perfect sense. But you can make the same OS setup for foobar too, don't you? And being the other conditions identical, why should cplayer provide lower jitter than foobar?
I am saying that on modern OS with running GUI (any, not only windows) you cannot control your CPU usage down to single CPU percents. And if decoding flac takes 1%, it is below the "load noise". The CPU usage can shot up (we are talking single percentage points) at any moment, outside of your control. Therefore I believe playback of wav vs. flac cannot be distinguished on a consistent basis and properly conducted blind tests would prove the assumption.
You are right, I have not and do not intend to do so. I do not have a windows system available on hand but that is certainly easy to solve
If the author made the source code available, I would certainly be interested in studying his solution. Most likely we would not find anything different from foobar as there are not many ways to feed data to the sound card properly to make it bit-perfect and deliver the data on timely basis. Basically things can only be technically correct or screwed to varying level here
I appreciate the discussion with you.
CMP is software designed to actually replace windows explorer. So it runs using the basics of windows, but shuts down explorer and various other tasks when it is run. When you boot into CMP you don't see windows, only the cPlay GUI.
The total memory usage when running in CMP is around 40 MB. When playing music the RAM usage goes up according to the size of the file being played as CMP can load the file to RAM (if you set it up to do so).
foobar can not replace windows explorer, though, I believe that you can use the foobar GUI but playback using the CMP shell. (I never tried this)
cPlay is the GUI, CMP is the replacement windows shell.
I think ( from fading memory) I have read that XXX Highend software also shuts down processes when it is run to get "better" sound quality. But this software is not free so I have not spent much time investigating it. Not free = Not interested.
I erased it because I had to leave for call out, so could not edit properly.
I had raised this point with folks on hydrogenaudio, a site that hosts a forum for development of foobar for instance.
My question was if there is a mechanism how a player itself could introduce jitter.
My understanding of the playback process from HDD is that the data is read in packets into the soundcard buffer, which then reads the clocked signal into a dac or feeds it to SPDIF. There is no jitter possible as there is no timing issue between a sender and receiver, the timing only happens once at the readout from the buffer.
As of now no one at hydrogen could think of a mechanism how the player software could introduce jitter.
I also doubt that the various processes running on my media server at the same time I play music in ASOI direct from the player to the soundcard influence the audio signal.
Noisefloor it definitely not a problem in my setup - when I stop/pause playback, there is absolutely no audible noise at the speakers even at max volume - different from my previous analog setup where the analogue active crossover noise was audible on 0 signal.
I run usually run downloads while listening or browse the internet.
I appreciate that there are many free players available for playback. I just don't buy the claim that between players - using Asio playback without any DSP - audible differences are discernible.
I had raised this point with folks on hydrogenaudio, a site that hosts a forum for development of foobar for instance.
My question was if there is a mechanism how a player itself could introduce jitter.
My understanding of the playback process from HDD is that the data is read in packets into the soundcard buffer, which then reads the clocked signal into a dac or feeds it to SPDIF. There is no jitter possible as there is no timing issue between a sender and receiver, the timing only happens once at the readout from the buffer.
As of now no one at hydrogen could think of a mechanism how the player software could introduce jitter.
I also doubt that the various processes running on my media server at the same time I play music in ASOI direct from the player to the soundcard influence the audio signal.
Noisefloor it definitely not a problem in my setup - when I stop/pause playback, there is absolutely no audible noise at the speakers even at max volume - different from my previous analog setup where the analogue active crossover noise was audible on 0 signal.
I run usually run downloads while listening or browse the internet.
I appreciate that there are many free players available for playback. I just don't buy the claim that between players - using Asio playback without any DSP - audible differences are discernible.
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I do appreciate your re-posting. I think we are on the same bank of the river
And just think of the claims - thicker bass, fuller mids, smoother highs - all these "features" engineered on purpose into the players, performing consistently, while keeping playback bit-perfection. IMO all voodoo instead.
And just think of the claims - thicker bass, fuller mids, smoother highs - all these "features" engineered on purpose into the players, performing consistently, while keeping playback bit-perfection. IMO all voodoo instead.
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