I ripped about 2000 CDs to three 500 gig hard drives as WAV files using WMP 11 because it was easy and fast. The sound quality of WMP 11 is awful but the cateloging interface seemed better than the others. I ended up using dbamp, winamp, itunes and monkey audio alternatively to play files. Monkey audio has started having the digital gurgle sound I get often with WMP. DBamp loads fast and seems to have good sound quality most often. I really don't like any of these programs. They seem to be well suited to people who want to fiddle futz with the computer and not to people who just want it to play music with high quality sound output. Next time I have a few thousand hours to waste I will try again using a better ripper like EAC and spend time finding and correcting all the missing and incorrect album art and track information. I output my digital signal from sound card on coax to an optical converter and input the optical signal to my stereo thus avoiding any ground loop issues. Any thoughts?

Unless you do something to screw with the sound, Winamp simply plays what is there. It will not make things sound any different than the basic data the file contains. I don't know anything about the other programs you mention except that my version of Monkey's Audio does not play audio files, it simply compresses and decompresses them. Playing audio seems like a strange side path for the program to take.

I know there is some version(s) of WMP that is supposed to extract without lossy compression, but the only time I ever tried to use it to extract from CD, there was nothing but various degrees of lossy available. Are you sure you got wav files that are really what was on the CDs?

If you dig deep into the guts of WMP you can set it up for lossless encoding. In any case, you should set it up to use WMA-Pro encoding, not WMA.

Any sort of distortion, on the other hand, sounds more like either an RT or other bug.

What soundcard and OS are you using?

Try Mp3toys @ mp3toys.net.

It has an external player feature so you can use a better sounding player, but use its great content management (one of the best I have seen in lay out and gettitng cover art and Lyrics). I use it primarily with Foobar, but have used it with winamp, xmplayer, etc.

If you are using .wav files though, Mp3toys will only work nicely if the files are in seperate folders titled in the form of "Artist- Album" with single .wavs inside. It doesn't dig cue sheets.

YOu can get great sound quality this way, but with an easy to use "listner based" gui.

I am using XP pro. I did set WMP to rip to wav files. The sound card is Diamond but since I am just outputting the digital signal the D/A converters are in my stereo I assume the sound card quality is not important. the sound quality is fine with say DBamp and bad with Monkey Audio or WMP on the exact same file. I am now adding my tracks to Itunes to see if the sound quality is any better.

I think what he's trying to say is he is using WMP, dBpoweramp Audio Player, Media Monkey, and Itunes to play back his .wav files.

IMHO none of those players are going to give you the performance you can get from Mp3toys driving Foobar and ASIO 4 all.

I guarantee you that xp is resampling your material from 44 to 48k. If you can bypass that and not resample, then things will sound better. ASIO 4 ALL with Foobar will help alot, but is a band aid for a real ASIO output.

But better to get a card that supports ASIO, and has a better digital output. Even a cheap card like the M-audio Revolution 5.1 will do this.

You may also try Kernal streaming with Foobar. If your card will work with this, you should get better performance.

Itunes is great on a mac, but no one is seriously using it on a PC for sound quality.

Hey Greynol thanks for poking at this, it caused me to look into matters a bit closer.

A while ago I was trying to use an external dac with a second pc system. THe onboard audio had a spdif out, and try as I might, I could ONLY get 48k on the output. I tried on my 3rd pc that also had onboard spdif. It had the same behavior. I concluded that it must be windows resampling.

Well, after your post I messed around with both pcs that now have a M-audio revolution 5.1. Both of them would play 44.1 from windows media player.

So I guess I was blaming windows when it was the onboard audio. I supposed I should have said the onboard audio and not windows. I supposed it depends on the card in question.

Cool thing is that with Foobar and SRC, the M-audio would out put 192k DIGITALLY.

You did turn off all the DSP in both WMP and MA, right?