I may not be able to answer the question fully, but there are several ways in Linux to see how your audio is handled. After you installed one of the audio players suggested at the beginning of this thread (plus perhaps
Strawberry), you can do some checks to see how audio is handled:
lsof /dev/snd/*
lists the programs that are using sound.
watch -n0.5 'pacmd list-sink-inputs | tee -a sound-inputs.log'
shows / monitors the pulseaudio inputs currently active. Only relevant when you have pulseaudio running on your Linux system. This command can be helpful when playing music via alsa to monitor if any pulseaudio is "interfering". If nothing else is producing sound, it will show
0 sink input(s) available.
I'm running gmusicbrowser as my audio player using the settings described in this thread and - while playing - it will block other sound output. In other words, gmusicplayer is able to take exclusive control of the sound output on the specified device. This goes a long way in ensuring that the audio is not mixed.
Assuming you use ALSA, you can list your output devices like this:
aplay -l
While playing music, check with this command:
cat /proc/asound/card0/pcm0p/sub0/hw_params
Replace the card0. pcm0, sub0 entries with what you found with aplay -l. Here is an example output:
access: RW_INTERLEAVED
format: S32_LE
subformat: STD
channels: 2
rate: 44100 (44100/1)
period_size: 440
buffer_size: 8820
The above should give a good indication on the audio output.
In general, Linux should provide more and better tools for bit-perfect audio. The reason I'm saying that is because Linux can be downsized to the essential tasks, and there are real-time Linux distros or options. There are some audiophile distros as well, see for example
https://www.thewelltemperedcomputer.com/Linux/Distro.htm.
Hope it helps.