Hello..i recently bought the ik arc system.i'd like please to suggest me a nice sounding player(like vlc-windows media player etc..) which can accept vsts..thanks

There was a thread on this just yesterday, you might want to check it out.

I use Foobar with George Yohng's vst addon, there is also a vst addon on the main Foobar page, I feel it's much more of a hassle to load plugins though.

Christian Budde's page has a vst loader for Winamp.

could you please send me the link of this thread??

thanks for the link..i did a small research and some other people suggested me also:
-Winamp (with VST Winamp Bridge) http://www.winamp.com/plugin/vst-winamp-bridge/146317

-J River Media Center
-Silverjuke.
-Foobar2000
-fidelia
-River Media Center (a really nice but for pay media player) with native VST support or in the realm of free player there's a plug-in for FooBar 2000 that let's one use VSTs in it


so..it seems that there are many options..the point is which one sounds and works better !

Just like DAWs, MediaPlayers should all sound the same. If they don't then the developer did something terribly wrong. That's what the theory says and it can be proven by experimentation, trust me...

Now for the "what works better", that's totally up to personal taste and preference. Chances are that if you worked like 5 years with WinAmp you don't want anything else. Baby Duck Syndrome. Try them all, make up your mind, and report us our findings.

That's got to be true only if you playback wav or lossless files...

Me thinks there's just one proper way to decode an MP3. The audible damage is done in the encoding, not the decoding.

You can try it. Take for instance the WAV file with test tones generated by RMAA. Encode it with LAME or whatever, the settings don't even matter. Then decode it back to WAV using all different programs & methods. Load them back in RMAA so you can compare the results.

I can't be bothered to perform that test, but if you really wanna know what's going on under the hood on then you have to put some time into it.

Here are some test that suggest otherwise, arguably they are quite old so it is likely that decoding quality difference between various decoder is narrower today than what's outlined there.

http://mp3decoders.mp3-tech.org/objective.html

If you want to do a funny subjective listening test I suggest you download the mp3 surround player demo from fraunhofer and playback with it some 320kbps CBR mp3s that have lots of crystaline highs and compare that with your average media player playback...

http://www.iis.fraunhofer.de/en/bf/amm/download/software/dow nload/download/index.jsp

No, I don't. Because I know my ears cannot be trusted with subtle things like a 0.1dB volume difference. That's why I recommend RMAA doing the analysis, it's guaranteed to be totally objective.

You could use DDMF Virtual Audio Stream: http://www.virtualaudiostream.com/