Mac OS X users: sbooth.org Play vs iTunes?

[wilyodysseus]

I've just spent the last couple of hours listing to Apple lossless files in both iTunes and sbooth.org Play. Is it just me, or is there a subtle but audible difference in sound quality? I'm not sure which one sounds better or worse, but they do sound different to my ears.

I haven't poked-around the source code yet, but the only thing that jumps out in the feature list is that "Play processes all audio using 32-bit floating point precision, providing the highest possible playback quality for files sampled at all bit depths."

Does anyone have a theory as to why casting a 16-bit source file to 32-bit floats would change the sound quality? I'm presuming that such a type conversion would just pad-out the extra bits with zeros. Am I off-base there?

Thanks.

 

[ph0rk]

If you really want to know, hook up another machine to the digital out of your music machine and record the output in the digital domain from each player at the native bitrate and frequency of the track.

If the files are different, one of them is munging things. Compare to the original to see which one.

 

[wilyodysseus]

Unfortunately, I don't have a machine with a digital input. On another unix-like OS, I could probably do something along the lines of capturing /dev/audio, but I think Core Audio side steps that under OS X. I guess it wouldn't kill me to buy an Audio Hijack Pro license....

 

[hockeyb213]

I don't know to my ears play sounds better on my macbook pro which is really odd makes my iems not have any hiss out of the audio jack which I always had under itunes which is extremely odd but imo play sounds a lot better seems like it does something like asio did for windows