What are your player settings?

foobar2000 - output is through directsound and no equalizers, plugins, etc. enabled

xmplay - output is through directsound and no equalizers, plugins, etc. enabled

Man I'm boring.   But why mess with lossless audio that's already as good as it gets?

Foobar-

Output- WASAPI, KS

DSP- 5.1 To Stereo (for DVD-A rips and DTS) & SoX Resampler (I leave it active but set it up to be used with different DACs to resample only when necessary due to the max output of the DAC).

ReplayGain w/ Preamp set.

Cheers

WinXP, Lilith > ASIO, 64bit float, VSTs: light EQ to iron out some sibilance issues, head-fit xfeed.

My foobar2000 config that's configured to work well with any song I play. I use my soundcard's EQ to adjust as needed for the headphones themselves, the foobar2000 EQ was adjusted for best possible detail/clarity similar to not using dolby headphone (I actually compared it with winamp quickly switching between the two to get a similar amount of clarity & detail) as the dolby headphone plugin alters the frequencies a bit (big boost to the lows which masks details). Every setting's been adjusted for a long long time one by one to determine in my ears the best possible result. I'm using kX Audio drivers for an Audigy 2 ZS card and the drivers already adds some slight width/soundstage by a pseudo surround effect though. The mixture of the drivers and these foobar2000 settings is like magic though and using any other player now sounds so bad/boring in comparision, the music surely comes to life with the foobar2000 config.

Makes it sound like you're listening to a concert when listening studio edited songs with much more depth and bigger soundstage and more dynamicness but not overly done. It changed my lifestyle, I can't cope a day without my daily dose of music. :)

foobar2000:

Use replaygain with foobar default settings, looking to use EBU R128, that is just released http://www.foobar2000.org/components/view/foo_r128scan later

Use Sox resampler with foo_vst and HDHPX crossfeed

As my DAC only supports 32, 44.1 and 48KHz. I set up two Sox mod2 resamplers, one downsampler x2 for 88.2 and 96KHz and another downsampler x4 for 176.4 and 192KHz. Reason: Sox resampler works faster if the target sample rate is even multiple of original sample rate.