What`s the best media player for a PC?

The best media player in terms of sound quality is the WINAMP 5. You can download the latest version if you are using a fast pentium computer say P4 1.5 GHz and higher with 256 MB Ram, otherwise, your system will be very slow in response

www.winamp.com

cd playback is a pretty bad bet on PCs as far as I understand it. You're better off encoding them to your HD in some sort of lossless format, and then playing them off the HD. Don't ask me why. One thing I do know is that it will be much more convenient. I use Foobar, which is considered by many to be the best in terms of sound and features (it's open source, so there are plenty of add ons).

I agree with dubzilla. Grab your audio CD using a good (for that task) CD-ROM drive and paly it from your HD.

But, you also can use one of the lossy formats with specific settings, and you do not encounter any harm to the sound qauality. I am talking about the Vorbis format with quality setting (something like bitrate for mp3s) 8 or over. If you have a REALLY good audio chain, set the quality to 9-10 while encoding your uncompressed audio.

For playing the audio files, definitely choose some player which does the "on-the-fly dithering" while palying the file, and which does all the processing in 32bit floating point numbers format. One of such a players is DeliPlayer, but maybe there are some others too.

DeliPlayer is also able to fully utilize the capabilities of your digital output card. For example, I am decoding media files to 24 bit with dithering and sending them with 24bit resolution to the external DAC. DeliPlayer does the decoding and dithering on-the-fly with excellent precision. I was surprised how good it sounds in comparison with players which decodes in 16 bit integer.

Of course, to be able to notice some difference, you have to use some quality DAC, amplifier and speakers/headphones.

Thank you very much guys for your responses.

Archiving my entire CD collection to a 250g HD right now. Using Windows MediaPlayer WMA lossless. About 300mb per disc.

The main probelm however is to output it to the stereo system. Currently considering PRISMIQ MeidaPlayer wireless system. Not quite sure yet.

Still trying to figure out what USB sound card to get.