Nikosgr

You mention that foobar is an improvement because of the dsp and the plug ins. As a matter of fact, I've compared foobar and xbmc with no dsp or plug ins now in two pcs. In both, xbmc sounds compressed when compared to foobar. Both are set to wasapi (not wasabi:-), same sample rates. I repeat, the difference in sound quality is not subtle. It is very easy to tell over a mp3 file at 128k. Nick.

Hello computer audiophiles, And congratulations to the Administrators of this unique resource of valuable info for us computer audiophiles. I'll get straight to the point. I've been using foobar/wasabi (with and without up sampling) in 2 PC setups throughout the years. One being my hi-if and the other one my Digital Audio Workstation. It's been about a year since I switched to xbmc (now v.12 rc2) on my hi-fi setup (mainly due to its ease of use). Having read this thread today I reckoned I would perform a quick A/B comparison between foobar and xbmc (both over the wasabi output). I also checked over directsound and ASIO4ALL (same results). Assuming I have not made any mistake, i.e to the best of my knowledge everything's setup the right way in both programs (the advanced setting of xbmc are even "tuned"to audiophile settings) I am afraid there is a very easily discernible difference in audio quality between these two. In favor of Foobar. More detail if I had to put it in short. I don't know why yet since they both output through wasabi (which is bit-perfect) but Foobar sounds much better to my disappointment. I'd prefer to have xbmc both for my video and audio playback whereas now I have to switch between the two. Anyway, I assume there's something going on before the signal gets to the wasabi drivers - I will post any developments as soon as there's are any and I'll be happy to get some feedback if anyone has more knowledge n this matter. That said, I wish you all a happy new year!