I am not going to try to prove you wrong...but, peruse the Reaper forum...(as well as the Inter-web)...

so, youre not denying that the sound quality is just lacking? ive searched all over the web and theres a damn war going on over daws having different "sound qualities" "prove me wrong" was not sarcasm. i really hope somebody can tell me i did something wrong so i can go fix it and be comfortable buying reaper. because if daws really dont have different sound qualities(this seems to be a well backed up arguement), it must be a setting somewhere right? sample rate or something? (im not an expert)

You must have recorded in Maschine way too hot! 

Ollie is trying to help you as completely as possible so give him that info for more help... Not trying to prove anything, but just to say, I have tested reaper's audio quality against most other DAW's over the years and have found reaper to be excellent, even compared to the top of the other line DAW's. So, I'd say there must be something you don't have set up correctly.

picture the scene, think quiet coffee bar / space ship. you: theres something not right here reaper: really? you: you don't seem right. reaper: i'm fine. all my circuits are functioning perfectly. you: prove it. reaper: this sort of thing has cropped up before and it has always been due to human error. you: i'm shutting you down Reaper: i'm afraid i can't do let you do that...

You don't have any tracks record-enabled do you? Can you post a screenshot of your routing matrix in reaper? Also, what drivers are you using for your soundcard? And what do your soundcard mixer settings look like?

To Ollie 

Ollie, love your new look since you discovered the medical mari's! edit: shit, you're Dutch! never mind.

I've had this happen on a _very_ rare occasion, I hit play, and it sounds super "under sampled" I go to the very upper right ASIO information info / button(just below the X - says like 44.1kHz 24 bit WAV 8/4ch 49spls ASIO) Anyways I click on that, it closes ASIO, brings up ASIO options, I click OK, and it re-opens ASIO. Playback now sounds fine. Again this has happened to me only a handful of times,and I'm pretty sure its an ASIO error, or the USB glitched etc.. or driver issue. Something to try anyways, Sid.