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Support - (fb2k) / Re: Foobar2000 v2.* playback sound quality lower than v1.X
Last post by Globares -...it's also worth noting that the benefit of ASIO is decreased audio latency, not increased sound quality. If there is a degradation in sound quality with ASIO output, it is either a driver issue or something else in the audio pipeline that is causing an issue.The ASIO drivers "sound" better, it doesn't mean that the bits are different - I assume that both pipelines are "bit-perfect", but latency, jitter or generally timing is crucial for spatial effect, i.e. the soundstage. They also impact other sound parameters. Windows Audio Mixer is to be avoided. It degrades the sound quality; "exclusive mode" improves things when properly implemented. Generally, no upsampling is much better than a bad one.
The v1 v2 difference is not big, so the question is how may people did A/B comparisons and what did they listen to. Acoustic songs are the best for this. Busy, rock tracks masks this issue, too. Is this Windows-only problem? I have no iOS to test it.
I’ve got no big hopes for a fix. Real-time stream profiling is a tedious task and first a developer (or the Developer 😊, don’t know if there’s a team), needs to reproduce the problem, however there’s a small chance that this “problem report” will trigger some ideas about changes in the data stream processing that could negatively affect the jitter when compared to version 1.X. We’ll see.