You keep wording your replies in ways that shrug off what I say. I did not include the nitty gritty details of the tests I conducted to know what's going on with my sound card. So I guess that's on me. I was only trying to say that it is possible to get pit perfect playback on Windows with the...

It works for my Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 5 Rx, since that's the thing controlling the bit perfect play back. I can tell it switches because there is a little pop when it does.

That may be true if you leave it on the default settings, but it does have the option to take exclusive control of the audio device. If your audio device has the ability to do bit perfect playback, then it will do bit perfect playback.

I agree, go with what sounds good. I just like to have a clean base to start from. Pretty much all of my music gets an Auto-EQ applied, declipped, high frequencies restored, and resampled. I pretty much make all the changes possible, but it sounds great to me. I still need that clean base-line...

If I remember right, it was just the tracks that are being encoded in the MQA format… but that Tidal is eventually going to convert their entire collection to that format. I don't remember where I read that, so don't just take my word as total truth.

Anyone can like the sound of Tidal, but at least one person has found it to be less than lossless. Besides all the watermarked tracks still on Amazon music, I have not found any of the claimed Hi-Res tracks to not be what they claim.

Well, you already turned down Foobar2000. The only other thing that got close to it was Windows Media player with the WMP+ add on.

Well, Amazon considers 44.1kHz 24 bit to be Ultra HD but not 48kHz 16 bit. Personally I put more weight in frequency for HDness, but that's probably because 12 bits of depth more than covers the all of the dynamic range of the analog tape reels used to record most of the music I listen to.

I don't blame him. MQA dose apply modifications to the sound... but it could be argued that vinyl also modifies the sound. Anyway, That's pretty sweet to hear about Apple making some more competition to Amazon music. Now I kind of wish I had waited a year to try their music trial.

Yeah I was confused by that comment too. 5.1 flac is just one of the several multichannel formats it can play.

Agreed. So, if your dac is to be trusted, we can conclude that the Amazon music app does some form of resampling to match whatever Windows is set to. (I am assuming that your dac correctly displays different sample rates while playing files in other music player apps.)

I don't have anything that will tell me the sample rate coming out of my computer, otherwise I would love to test out if it's actually switching per-track—or if the app just resamples everything to the Windows set rate. The pops I mentioned earlier, mainly only happen when I start or stop...

Looks pretty encompassing. I will be ultimately surprised if it can write play counts to media files though. So I'm still sticking with Foobar 2000.

The more you guys say about the app, the more happy I am with my sound card. Seems like all the issues mentioned are solved with the "Stereo Direct / Bit Accurate Playback" option it has. So, in the Amazon app, I have to make sure the loudness normalization option is off, the audio quality set...

I agree. It sounds like you have your sound card set to 48kHz in the Windows sound settings. The official drivers for my sound card can set it to 96kHz at the most, but Windows says it can be set up to 192kHz. The Amazon music player seems to agree with the Windows sound setting.