Cool man! With some of the reception I seem to get on this forum its rewarding to have some positivity! So glad you reported your experiences and seems like you tried a few more than I did. Years ago I tried sooooo many players my head exploded. So when I decided to ditch cPlay and I heard how great Hysolid sounded compared to some of the other options out there, I knew it was a keeper.Thank you very much for bringing hysolid back to my attention. Two months ago when I tried I was put off by its broken android remote app.
Yesterday I re installed it, and borrowed an ipad to control it. Wow!! Never knew windows could sound this good. I am really in love with the player design. No unneccessary user handles like scrubbing etc. Only play/pause. So super well structured and well timed instructions for the cpu to go though before pushing it to usb. And the detail improvement is staggering, even when pitted against the next best I've heard.
I have for few months used bass library based players like winyl, musicbee,xmplay and hqplayer as my reference. Albumplayer was a lot more analog sounding but didn't have that stronghold in dynamics that winyl had. Audirvana was fine but not as good as winyl. Didn't like jriver/roon much using as streamer and server in same system they sounded slightly like an input clipped amp (their architecture is better suited for Ethernet playback). All these players were levels ahead of mud-fi foobar (yea I'm fully with you on foobar being not high fidelity enough, and it's been measured as well). But all those players still had issues going in one way or other - glarey and intense but well textured, or laid back but lacking in texture (apart from foobar which had neither in a positive note).
I thought it was inherent to recordings or reproduction method. Boy was I wrong. Now I can hear a thousand shade in the treble notes with hysolid. Thank you so much. If anyone is still using foobar, I'd say the difference from foobar to hysolid on a decent DAC+amp system is greater than the difference from hd598 to hd600.
Note: all tests were done in asio whenever supported. Have made enough attempts to ensure that the differences are not stemming from un intended modifications in any configuration i set. No upsampling/resampling, no bit depth upscaling or padding.
Asio IMHO is a prereq for the best sound anyhow and hysolid once set up just works. I am leaving my gear on now and playing 24/7. Hysolid has not crashed in the last month I have left it playing....it just works. And since it seems to support high bitrates its probably pretty future proof.
Do you have a link for the foobar measurements???