Highest Possible Sound Quality from iTunes

[Confused]

In theory that's true, 'bits are bits', in practice though many experience that bit perfect player software can sound different and even the OS the software runs on makes a difference. (unfortunately, I can't wait for the day this all no longer matters and DAC's are immune to jitter and noise from computers and can work with any level of signal integrity once it crosses the critical treshhold of being bit-perfect...)

Picking up on this again, I did have a theory that it was the link between Quicktime and iTunes that caused iTunes sound quality to suffer vs JRiver and others.  Now it appears that iTunes as a standalone player runs WASAPI native, I am even more baffled why iTunes suffers this slight reduction in sound quality.