I've recently switched over from my ancient WinAmp to foobar2000 and have noticed a marked improvement in sound quality on all of my music. After reading a number of articles, the consensus is that foobar doesn't do anything differently compared to other music players and that this perception of improvement is purely placebo. This confuses me, though, because I'm hearing parts of songs (mostly during ramping intensity intros) that I've never heard before. This has sometimes happened in the past when switching to higher quality headphones, so it seems like a legitimate, similar perception quality increase. So, for the more technically savvy than myself, I'm posing these questions - could the improvements be due to better processing of the encoded media signals? Maybe bugs that were in out-of-date code for audio processing or codecs at certain frequencies have rectified? Thanks for taking the time to read and share your thoughts.
I've recently switched over from my ancient WinAmp to foobar2000 and have noticed a marked improvement in sound quality on all of my music. After reading a number of articles, the consensus is that foobar doesn't do anything differently compared to other music players and that this perception of improvement is purely placebo. This confuses me, though, because I'm hearing parts of songs (mostly during ramping intensity intros) that I've never heard before. This has sometimes happened in the past when switching to higher quality headphones, so it seems like a legitimate, similar perception quality increase. So, for the more technically savvy than myself, I'm posing these questions - could the improvements be due to better processing of the encoded media signals? Maybe bugs that were in out-of-date code for audio processing or codecs at certain frequencies have rectified? Thanks for taking the time to read and share your thoughts.
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