The big annoyance of MacOS had always been the lack of a player like Foobar2000. There still isn't anything like it. It lists several players that can do direct hardware access and resampling.
By the way, most new Macs have rather decent built-in Intel audio chipsets that support 24-bit and high sampling rates (96, 192 KHz).
And here's my own little blog post about resampling players, this was meant for Mac-owner friends.
Resampling is a must for serious playback of music. Default CD/MP3 sampling rate of 44100 Hz is too slow; the minimum quantum is too long, so dynamics get sluggish. This may not be that noticeable to someone used to 44 KHz until switching to a high-quality resampling soundcard or DAC/external interface. Resample twice or better (88.2 KHz, 96 KHz, 192 KHz...) and suddenly everything sounds smoother, livelier, more fluid, with a quickness that makes details come out that were previously unnoticed. Everything comes together as a whole. In short, resampling can make everything sound more natural, even though it won't return details that were damaged by rectification (in CDs, everything past ~5.5 KHz is damaged by lack of coordinates). So true high-res files will always have more spatial detail and a way more detailed treble and consequently much better presence and instrument separation/positioning than is possible for CDs. This is why vinyl lovers call CDs "flat", by the way - rectification damages the frequencies responsible for describing space.
Anyway, the lack of a MacOS port of Foobar2000 makes one wonder. Here's a list of players supporting resampling...
Aqualung is a port of an audiophile Linux player. The latest binary supports resampling, FLAC, Ogg, MP1/2/3, MODs, and Wavpack. No Monkey's Audio, AAC, WMA or Musepack support. No CDA support (who needs it though?). It can encode to FLAC/Ogg/MP3/RIFF/AIFF wave. And, it needs JACK server running before booting up - it only outputs through JACK.
Aqualung on MacOS X.
Audirvana is another resampling audiophile player, even though it's still a bit basic (no dither for 16-bit output, though most modern Macs don't need it). UI looks like a hardware DAC, too.
Audirvana.
