What makes foobar a good FLAC player ? Options

[elge]

Hi,

I'm a (Unix) system administrator, not a programmer, so my questions about development and the inner components of foobar2000 may seem a little naive to some of you. I'm also a passionate music listener, I'm equipped with a very good sound card and a premium HiFi installation: modified NAD + JMlab Onyx speakers. Foobar2000 is known by the audio community in France, like on the other parts of the world it seems, as the best FLAC and WAV player on Windows. To me, the quality with VLC is very good too, if not identical. But I've experienced a little less quality with Winamp + FLAC plugin. So here's my question. What makes Foobar2000 the player of choice for those who search for the best audio rendering ? I would like to know what FLAC decoder is used. I'm also interested in the specs of the MP3 decoder.

I have to say, the MAD MP3 decoder plugin on Winamp renders very good quality (as far as MP3 goes) and the FFSoX decoder plugin seems perfect to me for FLAC decoding (unlike the FLAC plugin). Does Foobar2000 use FFmpeg or SoX too ? So is the result supposed to be exactly the same with Winamp if I use the latter with that FFSoX plugin ?

In the end, does Foobar2000 = VLC = Winamp + FFSox ?

MAD Plug-in for Winamp: http://www.mars.org/home/rob/proj/mpeg/mad-plugin/
FFSox: http://in-ffsox.sourceforge.net/

Many thanks

Pierre-Philipp