Amarok > Quinessential Player?

[thor666]

Was running Amarok (music player) on Linux, and SURPRISINGLY - found that the sound reproduction was SOOO much better than Quinessential Player (Windows).

Which is an irony - I switched to Quinessential because Winamp was hogging up too much resources.

So my question to you guys is - could you recommend a Windows application that has near the equivalent of the quality of sound reproduction of Amarok? Or is it a driver issue (ALSA > Windows Drivers?)

Many thanks.

 

[sgtpepper]

thatz new!?

 

[gutturalpiss]

lol thor666, i used to have ugly playback with any Linux music player until some time ago. Thot it were my speakers and sound card, but i rmmbr Windows didn't sound as bad. Then automagically things started to sound good, maybe the drivers improved.

Recently, Linux on my notebook was the same case for headphone out. Then all of a sudden the sound was better after a full system upgrade which had alsa updates. So it must be the drivers. No wait, it must be the configuration also. Now all distributions have some form of multimedia tweaks to compete with proprietary operating systems, because even last year there were people complaining about bad audio playback quality using ALSA/OSS, and even for some distributions, bad video quality due to the default brightness and contrast settings being totally wrong. All these actually required simple tweaks.

I've been eyeing this new player, Aqualung: http://aqualung.sourceforge.net/

Havn't installed yet, but from what others have told me its audio playback is superior to Amarok's if one uses JACK - which is not a surprise. Looks come last for this one :lol: That reminds me, Amarok has some great skins which i never bothered to try out. www.kde-look.org

As for ur question, I really fail to understand why Windows would provide u with an inferior audio playback quality :? At most, on both platforms it will be somewhat the same, shouldn't be room for any significant difference if it's compressed music like mp3.

 

[thor666]

That's the thing - it doesn't make sense to me too! :lol: I didn't use any enhancers or equalization for either player. It just seems that Quinnplayer sounded bland, but on amarok the background instruments had extra clarity and depth without drowning out the vocals.

I think I'll try to search for other Windows media players while I'm at it, and see if it's the problem of Quinnessential player.

 

[thor666]

Small update. I went on a downloading spree and looked for alternative players for Windows. Tried foobar2000, Zinf, Xion, dbPowerAMP, Mecury Audio Player and another (I forget what).

It seems like even with the same audio implementation (I assume, all using Windows audio devices), there are slight differences in how the programmers actually program out the players themselves. Or it might be the supporting interface libraries that they use that are different. None of them give the same volume at 100% setting, no EQ and enhancement, so it's difficult to say which one is actually objectively better.

So far, imo, Xion stands out as slightly more balanced, has a slightly tighter bass. I'm not too sure, my ears may just be tired already. It looks pretty ok anyway with the sleek skin chosen, so I'll stick to that for now (on Windows).

 

[gutturalpiss]

ur right. i also think its how the application is programmed and with what libraries they work with. that is more likely the reason, and its a sane reason :lol: