First of all hello! Lurker deciding to post.
Before asking questions I'm going to give a quick run-down on my previous experience with higher-end audio, it's sort of relevant to the questions I have...
Always been a person wanting the best of the best when it comes to any kind of equipment really, I'm the kinda geek that spends over a a hundred dollars on a mechanical keyboard (And I know by heart how different Cherry MX keyswitches feel), I spend days agonizing over what mouse to get, and I cry myself to sleep when any of my trusty equipment breaks or fails me somehow.
Always been picky on music and audio quality, and in recent years been learning the finer points of hi-fi audio in general. Currently I'm using some great Beyerdynamics DT880 headphones, I've had them for about a year, and they've pretty much revolutionized my idea of "great sound" - my old speakers haven't been used for ages, I still to this day notice new things in music, movies, and games for that matter, thanks to these headphones. It's an emotional experience at times, I play an old track I used to like, and I notice brand new things in them, and it just strikes me how important it is to have a good sound system, and it's like wow.
Sadly I've been limited to driving them through the back of my Creative X-Fi audio card (Creative X-FI Titanium Fatal1ty Champion), and come to eventually realize why that's a bad thing. Sure, the sound is still great, but the card struggles to drive my DT880's (I have the 250Ohm version) in certain cases, and just kinda peters out (Particularly at low frequencies).
And then, just a few days ago, my headphones ended up on the floor by accident, and it was a pretty nasty fall, and now my left side is sounding rather funny. Thinking they're done for, of course I could attempt to get them fixed through warranty or w/e, but on the other hand I'm thinking maybe I should take a step up again.
So I look at the Beyerdynamics T1's. And considering it's a 600Ohm set, I'm thinking my sound card will just keel over and die trying to drive them properly, so it's time to consider some sort of amp.
Now the questions are - because I frankly don't know anything about amps/DACs so i'm not sure what's needed for a decent setup;
Should I scrap my Creative card and go for USB audio and an external DAC, should I keep the Creative card and use it's optical out to feed an external amp/dac, or what really works out best in the end for just getting the sound to the T1's? I personally don't care much for the X-Fi cards gaming-related extras, I have them all turned off because they make things sound way funky - I do spend a huge amount of time playing games, but I find playing with all the gamer stuff turned off actually gives a more accurate sound image and makes it easier to position things.
I do have the X-Fi Crystalizer enabled (at 85%), and have had that enabled since way back when they invented the thing - and I personally like it. I know there's a lot of things to be said for whether the Crystalizer is a good thing or not for most music, but I personally like the clarity it adds to even high bitrate music (I usually listen to 320kbps mp3, stream spotify, and the occasional .flac album).
It's strictly a computer-only thing, I'm probably literally never going to use the headphones for anything else ever, so it needs to be a permanent, good, practical solution.
My budget isn't exactly small, but the T1's alone are quite a bit of money, and I'm not sure I want to spend an equal amount on additional doodads just to get them to make a sound. That said I don't really want to "waste" the T1's potential either, so I'm not really keen on going on the extreme cheap side either. But it's hard to judge what is worth the money and what isn't, when I don't even know what I actually need. I've looked at stuff like the Xonar Essence One but I'm unsure how good this all-in-one solution is.
Anyone able to give good advice on any of this? The tl;dr version of the questions is basically "What do I need to hook up my headset to this computer properly?"
Anything would be much appreciated!
Edited by Mythricia - 11/15/11 at 3:21am
