Depends on your needs - What's important for you? - audio quality - multiple formats support (which ones)? - Fancy look (skins) - Visualisations - Additional features like video playback, CD ripping/burning, tagging, transcoding between formats - Low memory/cpu usage - ...
For me, Winamp seems to be the best audio player, and seems to be the best audio player for true 7.1 audio. _X_X_X_X_X_[small]HTPC: Asus A7N8X-DX - AMD 2200+ 512mb DDR400 1054gb SATA raid ATI Radeon 9000 AIW[/small]
For quality I'd choose foobar2000, because: - Lossily compressed files (e.g. mp3) from loud recordings clip on decoding, the result can be audible distortion. With fb2k this can be avoided using the replaygain feature and/or the clipping warnings it can display on request. - Its integrated high quality resampler (SSRC) can be used to resample output to 48kHz for soundcards that would resample 44.1kHz input to 48kHz internally in a crappy way (e.g. cheap soundcards based on AC'97 codec, most internal Creative soundcards) - There's Kernel streaming and ASIO output available that can be used to avoid the OS messing with the audio data and get bit-perfect playback. Most (all?) of these things can be done by some other players too AFAIK but probably not that easily. It's hard to tell though, if/how much using these features improves audible quality noticably for you. Probably any other decent player like Winamp will just sound the same.
