Do music player programs (Foobar, Winamp, Dopamine, etc.) affect the quality of digital music file playback? Or do they just spit out digital information to the DAC? Or sound quality changes due to prebuilt internal EQ from the player (software)? I am wondering if some programs fail to send complete digital information of a FLAC file to the DAC? Maybe it’s placebo thing; Potplayer (I use it to watch video files) makes the music much noisier than VLC to my ears.

If no difference, are there some better programs (for Windows) to playback digital music files (ie FLAC)? No commercial, no privacy theft, etc.

Thanks!