[Kalai]

I have a relatively good set up, the only thing that might be holding me back is windows media player. Does windows media player take away from sound quality? If it does can u give me an alternative to it? If it doesn't than let me know. I am listening on windows 7 HP. thank you!

 

[formula1]

Hello and welcome!
 
What's your associated gear? out of curiosity. 
There are good alternatives to WMP, such as Foobar which is free. Interface is not the best, but the SQ is pretty good. 
 
You can find on the threads posted, there are a ton of recommendations. 

 

[spbach]

  Hello and welcome!
 
What's your associated gear? out of curiosity. 
There are good alternatives to WMP, such as Foobar which is free. Interface is not the best, but the SQ is pretty good. 
 
You can find on the threads posted, there are a ton of recommendations. 

I can attest to this, I just downloaded the Graphic Equalizer and Playback Statistics components and now it's perfect.

 

[Kalai]

Hello and welcome!

What's your associated gear? out of curiosity. 
There are good alternatives to WMP, such as Foobar which is free. Interface is not the best, but the SQ is pretty good. 

You can find on the threads posted, there are a ton of recommendations. 

I listen with Mdr Ma900 and fiio eo7k. Songs are 256 Kbps mp3 (because it's so hard for me to find lossless)

 

[Kalai]

What about iTunes? Is the sound quality good on that? Better than foobar?

 

[kraken2109]

Another area of BS that headfi like to spread.
The player should make no difference to sound quality, even the FAQ section for Foobar states this. It also states that there is no benefit from using WASAPI.
 

Does foobar2000 sound better than other players?

No. Most of “sound quality differences” people “hear” are placebo effect (at least with real music), as actual differences in produced sound data are below their noise floor (1 or 2 last bits in 16bit samples). foobar2000 has sound processing features such as software resampling or 24bit output on new high-end soundcards, but most of the other mainstream players are capable of doing the same by now.

 

I am using ASIO/WASAPI/etc output and I am experiencing issues...

Do not use alternate output modes unless you must. There is NO benefit in terms of audio quality to using these, as far as music playback is concerned ( read more on the subject ).

 

[RMac]

  Another area of BS that headfi like to spread.
The player should make no difference to sound quality, even the FAQ section for Foobar states this. It also states that there is no benefit from using WASAPI.
 

Does foobar2000 sound better than other players?

No. Most of “sound quality differences” people “hear” are placebo effect (at least with real music), as actual differences in produced sound data are below their noise floor (1 or 2 last bits in 16bit samples). foobar2000 has sound processing features such as software resampling or 24bit output on new high-end soundcards, but most of the other mainstream players are capable of doing the same by now.

 

I am using ASIO/WASAPI/etc output and I am experiencing issues...

Do not use alternate output modes unless you must. There is NO benefit in terms of audio quality to using these, as far as music playback is concerned ( read more on the subject ).

 
I don't know why, but I had to switch from Winamp to foobar because Winamp was causing large bursts of static in my music.  Foobar?  None. 
 
I'm fairly technically competent and eliminated all possibilities of what it could be, different installs of Winamp did work but by then I was so sick of winamp that i made the permanent switch to foobar.
 
Foobar, ladies and gents.  it'll grow on you.  plus there are so many different customizations it's not even funny

 

[cel4145]

MusicBee is a nice, free, user friendly media player you can try.

 

[Notus]

  I don't know why, but I had to switch from Winamp to foobar because Winamp was causing large bursts of static in my music.  Foobar?  None. 
 
I'm fairly technically competent and eliminated all possibilities of what it could be, different installs of Winamp did work but by then I was so sick of winamp that i made the permanent switch to foobar.
 
Foobar, ladies and gents.  it'll grow on you.  plus there are so many different customizations it's not even funny

 

I actualy had this problem also with winamp, i figured it had something to do with stress on the system since it didn't happen when i was in windows doing nothing but listening to music.
But when i started a game and was listening to music and the same time, i had that horrible static noise. Switched to Foobar for that reason and also winamp started to be too heavy to use.
 
Tbh. would still use Winamp if i didn't have so many issues with the later versions.