Bob, I have both Windows Vista Ultimate and Windows 7 Home Premium and have tested both with 64 bit. I much prefer Windows 7 for transparency. I also use both Foobar2000 and J River with kernel streaming. With an untweaked machine I found Foobar2000 to be better because its more of a DOS than a Win app so its less affected by windows code bloat and closer to the hardware level. As I improved PC hardware speed (CPU, memory, SSD) J River started to win out, not as dynamic as Foobar but complex details sounded less stressed... the way a high performance car handles curves more easily than a stock car. And as bit rate went up the two began to sound closer together.
The big bugaboo for musical transparency is jitter... turns out that the human ear is every bit as sensitive to jitter in digital I/O transfer to analog as it is to the jitter in analog turntable reproduction from environmental vibration.
Thats why asynch USB connection to a DAC is getting attention...you can let an external clocking device drive your jitter levels down in PC digital output.
The big bugaboo for musical transparency is jitter... turns out that the human ear is every bit as sensitive to jitter in digital I/O transfer to analog as it is to the jitter in analog turntable reproduction from environmental vibration.
Thats why asynch USB connection to a DAC is getting attention...you can let an external clocking device drive your jitter levels down in PC digital output.