direct hardware playback with no resampling is simple for native Linux packages.
Pick sound device and turn it off in Pulseaudio (let Pulseaudio use other audio hardware if you still need playback for browser etc)
set audio player to ALSA and choose audio device for playback
The big downside of this is there is no full equivalent native Linux package that works like foobar2000.
I use Deadbeef, similar to foobar2000 as an audio player, but does not have the gui styling like foobar2000
Still have foobar2000 with custom layout I imported from XP years ago!
You should have a look at AVLinux documentation. AVLinux collaborates a lot with KX developers.
Recent AVLinux release has good setup of wine-staging and wineasio
Their Debian distro works better with KX packages than Ubuntu
(KX working on updates for 18.04 expected in June)
Not suggesting you use AVLinux instead of Ubuntu Mate, but they have good setup for wine-staging so musicians can keep using windoze VSTs.
The AVLinux manual is excellent document for learning about Linux audio and can be applied to any other distribution