Who has tried QCD 3.51 with Mad plugin and compared it to Foobar??
Any conclusions??

I use QCD all the time. It has some bugs in the areas that I use which is killing me.

• Repeat 1 has not been working with since 3.50.
  
• I have jitter during track jumps playing MPCs (posted on HA before)
  
• The main player interface does not show up sometimes. I need to do Preferences->Skins->Click on my skin for skin to be reloaded. Happens with all skins I tried.

But QCD supports Winamp DSP plugins which is very important for me because I use DirectX plugins through Adapt-X. It's much resource friendly than WinAmp and looks a hell lot better than Foobar. No *bar can match my QCD with professional Waves plugins.

MAD dithering is inferior to FB2k one (strong ATH dither) - ABX 8/8 on a test sample.
Create it yourself with a sound editor - 1kHz sines with 1 bit volume difference,
quietest one first, encode with LAME 3.90.x --alt-preset insane
Foobar2000 0.62a - 18 bits clean, 1 bit noisy (but it might be my equipment/ears)
MAD 0.14.2b (Linux, compiled for accuracy) - 16 bits clean, 2 bits noisy

MAD additionally has tendences to cut the end of VBR MP3 files,
but I don't know if QCD plugin has it fixed.

Anyway, MAD is better (quality-wise) than any non-dithering MP3 decoder, but slightly worse than FB2k.

I was a winamp junky but since normalising went out the window and replaygain came in I can't get enough of foobar2000.

Foobar 0.62a used to be my favorites (sound quality wise) but now my ears tell me that QCD3.51 is better , i.e. better separation, cleaner midrange etc...

Foobar 0.62a used to be my favorites (sound quality wise) but now my ears tell me that QCD3.51 (mad ) is better , i.e. better separation, cleaner midrange etc...

I don't think the difference is something that could be ABXed. There were a couple of people that claimed they ABXed that foobar sounded better. Although I don't believe it I guess if one is better it should be foobar because it's reputed to be so.

QCD all the way for me. I can't detect any difference between FB and QCD with MAD, but the whole user friendly experience of QCD is just so much more satisfying.

I am really glad that QCD has been getting so much exposure recently. In the last few months there have been new QCD plug-ins for MAD, mpeg123, ASIO o/p, Nero burn plug-in, ReplayGain, Xcopy with ReplayGain, etc.

The recent v3.51 is about as stable and bug free as any media player can get. (Repeat One works perfectly).

about:The main player interface does not show up sometimes.
you can press F5 when something wrong with the inteface display.

I think QCD is a excellent player for you to play and manage your music files especially when you want to tagging or renaming filenames (batch). Try its tagging and renaming functions(It can do what TagRename does). Also the QuickTrack is the best function when you want to control the playing tracks(But Winamp and foobar did so BAD!).

Just try it carefully...carefully then you'll find the greatest player.
Note: Try carefully:)

There's only one thing worse than posting BS... and that's posting the same BS twice.

Edit: OK, so you added "(mad)" in your second post, but you could have edited the original post instead.

From a technical point of view, MAD decoder (at least the 0.13.0b Winamp plugin I have tried) doesn't apply a high enough amount of dither, and this causes obvious noise modulation on certain low-level signals. FB2k is 0.62 is much better in this respect, there's not noise modulation problems in any case.

However, I doubt that this lack of dither, or even not dithering at all, is audible in practice, at usual listening levels. One example for this, is that FB2K versions previous to 0.60 had similar dither problems to MAD decoder, but AFAIK nobody has realized.

Other considerations such as better bass, stereo separation, etc, are simply not there, from an objective point of view, if you have all DSPs and eqs off, and same output levels. If you hear them it's probably due to your brain playing tricks on your perception. This is not uncommon, search for "placebo effect" and "ABX".

Poison Dan
If youre deaf check your ears

eugi,

please *read* KikeG's post again(?)...

and read forum rule #8!

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....=ST&f=1&t=3974&

Eugi, please note point 8, and follow it, or you go.

More depth might sound like 'cleaner midrange' sometimes,
but I'd rather call it 'crispier'.

But that's no excuse for rude posting.
Mind rule #2.

EDIT: slight mod