Best Headphone or headset for 350$

What kinds of music? What sound card? If it's the HT|Omega or Essence ST/STX, skip the Beyer DT880/990.

Take a look at the Mad lust envy guide for gaming. 

Gaming, stick with your Creative. There is no day and night difference gaming sound wise between my old Creative card and my new HT|Omega (about the standard and price as the ASUS). I'd even say the Creative was better for it's Alchemy stuff and boosted bass.

It depends on what you want, if most for gaming, most gaming sounds are compressed anyways. I seriously doubt there a lot if any Hi-fidelity potential there. In that case, the most wallet-efficient solution would be to stick with the creative. They do gaming well. If you want more movies and music. There will be an improvement to the ASUS STX. As for the RMAA tests, I don't know numbers, but what I've learned for the most part is that numbers don't always reflect the sound of a piece of equipment.

Quote:

Originally Posted by alz3abi 

well i did too much research about the Asus recently , i agree with you Asus not perfect for gaming it is Ok , but if check this review from what i see most of the RMAA test, Asus go beyond 20Khz easily comparing to Creative . http://www.overclockersclub.com/reviews/asus_xonar_essence_stx/6.htm

It is strange, there is no such problem at 48 kHz sample rate, but at 96 kHz, everything above 20 kHz is cut off. This could be a bug in the drivers (from the experience I had with Creative cards, their Windows drivers are not the most reliable), or the measurements were not made correctly. Other than that, the DAC on either card is good enough, you should probably choose based on features relevant to gaming, and - if you do not intend to buy an amplifier - how well the headphone output stage of each card performs (unfortunately, there is rarely much useful information available on this, even though parameters like output voltage and impedance are easy to measure).

Quote:

Originally Posted by alz3abi 

well i did too much research about the Asus recently , i agree with you Asus not perfect for gaming it is Ok , but if check this review from what i see most of the RMAA test, Asus go beyond 20Khz easily comparing to Creative . http://www.overclockersclub.com/reviews/asus_xonar_essence_stx/6.htm

Can you even hear 20 KHz? I have a hard time hearing 15 KHz and above already, and I'm not even that old! It was a startling revelation when I started messing with test tone generators...

Personally, if you have a Titanium HD already, I don't see much reason to go with the Essence STX unless you wanted to switch from Windows to Linux as your main OS or something like that. Just get an external headphone amp if you need one and be done with it.

Besides, gaming is where the X-Fi-based cards excel. Not that games are known for hi-fi audio, but I still play my fair share of titles that use EAX versions 3 through 5 (and they still work with the help of ALchemy), and of course, we have CMSS-3D Headphone, which can apparently even be applied to a PCM S/PDIF stream for whenever you want to step up to an external DAC. (For some reason, Xonar cards won't output Dolby Headphone-processed S/PDIF from what I've heard here. I don't see why not.)

As for what to use for gaming...on the affordable end, there's the AD700 (hated by a few for high price and lacking low end, but definitely great for competitive gaming), SR850 (haven't tried), and FA-011 (haven't tried that one either). On the "likely to max out or exceed your budget" end, there's vintage Stax Lambda systems that you might find used within your budget, but most will require a speaker amp to drive the supplied transformer box, meaning additional expense if you don't already have one.

1: Count me lucky, but I haven't had any serious driver problems with X-Fi cards under Windows as of late. It did take a while for Auzentech (in reality, Creative) to iron out some X-Fi Prelude driver quirks, but the latest versions work fine. Same with the Forte and the Titanium HD. If anything, the Titanium HD seems a tad more stable for some reason, especially regarding mode switching.

2: Huh...that's odd. I'll admit it right now: I have no current use for Dolby Digital Live or DTS Connect as a headphone-only user, and probably won't unless someone lends me an Astro Mixamp to test Dolby Headphone. For that matter, I just don't have much of a use for S/PDIF until the time to get an audiophile DAC arrives, which is several years away at the earliest.

Beyerdynamic MX300?