Sorry I missed this thread, as I had previously researched this whole issue:
1 - regarding foobar, the developer a) is a "sound quality denier" and more importantly, b) refuses to believe that lowering buffer size in an audio player would not always make thngs worse, despite my giving him quotes to the contrary from DAC designers.
2- foobar 0.8.3 actually sounds better than the curent foobar, especially with the otachan asio plugin (google search is your friend), and 0.8.3 allows under 50 ms buffer size. However, the flac plugin was never fixed to allow 24-bit flac to work in all cases.
3 - musicbee developer is not particularly interested in sound quality, but is friendlier and willing to make minor changes to suit setups that he does not own. Their forum threads include one about the .ini file setting that allows you to set the buffer as low as you want, even to zero. So, you can use WASAPI with musicbee, but:
4 - it turns out that WASAPI is better in theory, but not in practice, and ASIO is still the best sound quality, and...
5 - ASIO4ALL with HRT works best for me with all 3 settings turned down to minimum.
Feel free to PM me for any details.