Another interesting aspect to throw in here is that when I tried Jriver vs Foobar/ASIO4ALL they didn't sound the same to me. I'm not alone in thinking this yet they are both bit-perfect.
I think I mentioned in this thread that I compared Foobar to WMP and the former sounded far better. I went searching for reason and found out in default mode, it uses the same pipeline as WMP. And the FAQ emphatically said there is no sound quality difference. I went and tested again and this time they sounded the same. Now here is the very interesting part: if I imagine the differences I used to hear, I can bring them all back! Yet if I remind myself that they can't be there, they vanish. Don't know if everyone can do this. It is not easy to suspend "belief."
But it is a worthwhile experiment. Try to tell yourself and convince yourself that there can't be a difference and see if it changes the outcome.
Of course the definition of placebo effect is that it is not a lasting difference.
Re the Jriver popup - I don't have an issue with their saying in may degrade the sound - this is their subjective opinion and however Jriver have engineered their sound it's presumably what they prefer. I do have a big issue with their saying JPLAY is a Hoax. This oversteps the line of what is reasonable to say, even by a competitor. Even if someone doesn't like the sound of JPLAY or thinks it sounds the same as every other bit-perfect player, there's no doubt it plays music so it's not a hoax.
If it is a plug-in, how could it be a competitor? Let me give you an analogy. When I was at Microsoft, we would get millions of crash reports that users would send to us. When examining the crashes for Internet Explorer, by far and I mean vast majority of it was caused by Flash plug-in. Wanting to be politically correct as you suggest, we did not tell the world about it. But I can't tell you how tempting it was to issue a press release and say that the #1 cause of crashes was not our software, but this poorly designed plug-in. I am pretty sure the user community would have been better for it had the spotlight put on Flash to clean up its act. To this day it is the #1 thing that causes slow down and crashed on my Chrome browser.
By the same token, JRiver may be doing what we wished we could do at Microsoft. If the plug-in crashes, slows things down, and in general causes reliability problems, it will "degrade" the experience and Jriver potentially get the black eye. So I can see how someone says, "look guys, this is junk, it has no redeeming value other that add bugs to our software; let's let the world know in no uncertain terms that is the case," just like we wished we could have done with Flash.
As others have said if it can "degrade the sound" but as it's bit-perfect then the Jriver argument doesn't stack up.
I agree they have left the door ever so slightly open on their wording to invite the same argument against them. So they should change this wording. Instead of calling it hoax, they should say something along the lines of what I said, "it is the opinion of JRiver that fidelity differences cannot come from changes made by this plug-in; using it may degrade your experience should the software make changes that cause playback to be interrupted or the software to crash." They would still make their point without causing so much uproar.
