Ah, well, the human ear is a much more finely tuned instrument than your decoders and players. Think of the feelings you get when you hear the ocean waves, the birds sing, a thunderclap!
Can you turn this into mere "bits"? Of course not!
That's why it is so important to protect against sub-bit quantization errors, and this can only be done with proper interconnects. Ordinary cables allow the bits to travel willy-nilly until they jam up against each other creating a brittle, edgy soundstage. Quality interconnects are tuned, aligned, and harmonically shielded to keep those precious bits - and the all-important spaces between them - in a smooth flow.
And then, we can hear all of the things that make us human.
Same file -> same playback.
If you hear the same sound file twice (or two identical files) and hear something different, you software is broken or you're imagining things.