From whatever my experience has been with Windows Audio:
any optimizations aside, any player that claims audiophile enhancements or bitperfect play like jplay, audirvana, jriver process sound internally. But people do like the sound that come out from them. If you are purist, stay away from them.
What exactly do you mean by "process sound internally"? Do you mean that these players change the source data before spitting it out? If yes, is that just your opinion? If yes, what is this opinion based on? I'm very curious to know and will be happy with an answer. What player would you recommend that is bit perfect?
Windows was never designed for playing audio or even video. Just because it is used extensively and is so user friendly, we expect it to do everything perfectly.
Windows and mass market OS's are never designed to fulfill just one specialized purpose (extremely well). They are at best/worst the plumbing [for want of a better analogy] that controls the underlying hardware and provides the means to utilize it effectively and efficiently (at the least) via software that may be written for a specialized purpose. Some OS's have fancy GUI's to do this which Windows does to make it user friendly or idiot proof and others don't. This plumbing comes bundled with a set of commonly used applications. Some applications are efficient, some not so much. Again, none of these are built to cater to a niche audience. So, niche users find them lacking for their purpose. We have hardware (which Win is not), we have the OS (which Win is) and we have software (developed by Win and others). The OS is also software but let's not go there. All of these work or can be made to work hand in hand very efficiently to fit and suit one's purpose if one has the knowledge and tenacity. Some OS's are open source, so one can easily remove everything not needed to make it lean and some (like Windows) are closed source which makes it difficult to disable/remove unwanted stuff. But with pain, it can be done.
Whatever magic we do with the OS, a laptop or a PC does not have the hardware to play music of high quality. I do believe Asus has some special circuitry in some of their models, but that is also meant for games.
What hardware do you believe needs to be in place for high quality music? Noise reduction? Better grounding? Better isolation? Better shielding? Eliminating SMPS? I believe all these (and more) are lacking in typical hardware running Windows and need to be improved in general purpose machines. But for the hardware manufacturers it is not a priority because it does not in the least affect the purpose for which they are built. So, we live with what we cannot control easily, do what we can with what we can control - the OS and software, and thus, we can make Windows do what we want it to do and do it extremely well ALONG with the other stuff that comes with Windows; the usage of which is part of many of our lives now.
That said, if you can send an audio file in digital format to an external DAC, why do you need to do anything else?
That is a commonly held fallacy just like the concept of digital music being just 0's and 1's and thus not needing "special" handling. There are tons of resources about this on the internet written by people more qualified than me so I won't belabor this. All I can suggest is one word - "Google".
If you are going to listen to music from your laptop, use a set a good speakers, and the audio is of fairly decent quality.
Yes. But for some, just decent quality is just not good enough.
I listen to an hour of music every day using a software called Audacious and a set of speakers that costs a ridiculous 10$ (
https://us.geniusnet.com/product/sp-hf160/), and I don't find anything greatly amiss in it.
What's your benchmark?
You play a Blu-ray disk from an HTPC and a regular player, you can see the difference. There is nothing wrong with the PC. Just that it is not optimized for the task and is dependent on too many hardware and software that are in the path of the media. That is one of the reasons, why after using a HTPC for over 10 years, I am actively looking at moving to a media player.
Again, hardware and software! But really, it is nothing much to do with as you say "too much" in the path. You control what you can. And there IS granular control of quality if one knows how to. Also, there are HTPC's available at different price points with different (better?) hardware thus offering varying levels of performance. We often use bundled (with the OS) software and then base our conclusion on their performance. We should not do that.
All that aside, I think Raspberry Pi and associated DACs have made the concept of fooling around with Windows completely redundant. An RPi3 + an Allo DAC comes well under 7K, and that beats the pants off most systems. It is so tiny, you can keep it next to your laptop and hear music in genuine HiFi. You can even stick it with double sided tapes under you table, so it does not take any space. And, you can control it from your Windows system. And the best is that you can misuse the system thoroughly. Switch it off halfway, keep it on the whole day, forget to switch it off before you go to bed.... it seems to take all this with a smile.
All these points are valid for the RPi but are equally valid for modern Windows machines that are available for quite some time now. There are Windows machines commonly available at a size a little more than the Pi, that can do numerous things (that a Pi cannot). And I don't quite see the point you're trying to make of the RPi being so tiny that one can keep it next to one's laptop and hear music in genuine HiFi. What has tiny and proximity to the laptop got to do with genuine HiFi? I'm missing something here.
No licensing and other issues are other great advantages.
Yes.
I never even had to rewrite the OS in nearly 6 moths of abusive usage of the poor system.
Why would one need to do this “rewrite" for any OS? Modern OS's are resilient enough to take a LOT of abuse.
Why would I even bother fooling around with Windows?
Leave alone Windows, one shouldn't fool around with any OS if one does not know what they are doing. If not fooling around with Windows floats one's boat - that is enough happiness. For some, that level of happiness is not enough, knowing that one can be happier by extracting more performance. That's why people write software to do what needs to be done better. And the users run that software with one (or many) button clicks and the software performs the purpose that it is written for. For the user - painless. For the developer/s of any software - the journey is definitely not painless especially with Windows, but the results speak for themselves when the user is happy. Period.
Just my 2 paisa worth.
