My setup for testing was regular surge protector>stock dell desktop computer>$10 9ft. cables to go velocity series usb cable>usb-audio.com asio software with pcm2707 drivers going to my headphone setup in my profile. Almost three hours of the same song (still listening to it ^^) and found that:
foobar+otachan was pretty off from neutral due to too much emphasis on highs and confused and anemic bass, but details on many things
mediamonkey+otachan was balanced but sometimes became rather sloppy at weird times
windows media player+ ASIOWmpPlg is balanced like mediamonkey but less sloppy.
cplay alone is a bit better than mediamonkey+otachan and wmp and close to wavelab but on rare occasions it sounds strange on the bass
cplay+cmp without any tweaking except what's available inside cplay's and cmp's settings sounds about the same as wavelab, maybe even more neutral and crisp, can't be certain because every time I tried it and exited, windows had to be restarted
.
wavelab has balanced written all over it with no sounds sounding confused after many runs over the same song. It presents things so smoothly and continuously you just want to listen forever to the same song.
I really like both cmp+cplay and wavelab, haven't decided which I like best because I have to restart too much with cmp+cplay but I would not be surprised if cmp+cplay was better, right now I get a strong feeling that cmp+cplay has more crisp detail, but wavelab does have a sense of continuity to it which I really find enjoyable, and both are certainly superior to my iriver h120's optical output with glass toslink, which I think is just slightly above foobar and mediamonkey.
edit: hmm cmp+cplay just put my computer into limbo land and I can't alt+ctrl delete to restart the computer
. Well just wanted to add the reason I didn't put the computer on the power conditioner because I noticed it made all the asio's sound closer to each other, and I didn't test optical from my sound card because I just tried it and got a lot of static, fried my sound card from putting single channel opamps into dual channel sockets
. But darn, usb sounds good, I really wonder what happens if I tried optical.