wow coolplayer does sound better than winamp, but why?

[dpopiz]

a lot of people have said that coolplayer sounds better than winamp and others. I never believed that, but now I've compared them both side by side and it's really true, coolplayer actually sounds better when playing the same mp3s. how can this be though? isn't MP3 a standard? isn't there a standardized algorithm to decompress it? how is it that a particular mp3 can sound different when played on different players? that must mean that different players use different ways of decompressing/rendering the file

 

It's probably just the EQ settings. Play around with them in Winamp, and you'd probably get the same effect.

 

[skace]

Yea or you could try installing some plugins for winamp like FX6. Most of these plugins do things like an EQ would do but to a greater extent.

 

[dighn]

Originally posted by: dpopiz
a lot of people have said that coolplayer sounds better than winamp and others. I never believed that, but now I've compared them both side by side and it's really true, coolplayer actually sounds better when playing the same mp3s. how can this be though? isn't MP3 a standard? isn't there a standardized algorithm to decompress it? how is it that a particular mp3 can sound different when played on different players? that must mean that different players use different ways of decompressing/rendering the file

no, not all mp3 encoders/decoders are the same.

there are different decoders. do you use MAD plugin for winamp? coolplayer has MAD decoder builtin

 

[dpopiz]

I don't use EQ on either player, so it's not that.

so should MAD theoretically make winamp sound just like coolplayer?
on the winamp site, it says MAD is a "dithering decoder with support for 24- and 32-bit". dithering? is that sort of like upsampling the 16-bit mp3 to something higher? why would that make it sound better?

 

[tweakmm]

Audio piped through the Kmixer all sounds bad, regardless of how it's decoded.

 

[dpopiz]

Kmixer?
what's that?

 

[dpopiz]

I still don't understand why different decoders would produce different output from identical input, and especially why a software mixer would. I mean theoretically, all decoders that adhear to the mp3 standard should use the same algorithm to decode, and therefore produce identical output. also, before it gets to the soundcard, audio is just raw digital data travelling through the computer, right? so how could anything affect the sound quality besides the soundcard?

 

[sandorski]

Sonique sounded better than WinAmp too, both at default.