selbi said:

Thanks a ton for your insightful comment.

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grumpyoldguy said:

Your IEMs produce 117 dB SPL at 1Vrms. That's pretty sensitive. Do you have some over the ear headphones you can try?

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selbi said:

  I've purchased a Fiio E10K to get rid off my crappy computer's on-board sound, namely hissing. And it worked fine.
 
Now, I've recently picked up a part-time intern job in an IT company (I'm a student). There are times in which there simply is nothing to discuss, and I got a single-person office, so I asked my boss if it was okay to listen to music and he was totally fine with it. But alas, the computers are optimized for CPU usage to be used with Virtual Machines and intense computing applications. Not graphics or, for that matter, music.
 
Hissing ahoy. Lemme tell ya. The motherboard probably has a sound chip the size of a fingernail in it, just to produce anything.
 
So I brought my E10K to work today and plugged it into the front-rear USB ports and my earphones in the DAC. The audio quality definitely improved, but the hissing was still very noticeably there...
 
Did I misunderstand the concept of DACs? I was expecting to get the exact same audio quality that I get at home, as I thought DACs completely bypass the on-board soundchip and do their own audio shenanigans.

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music alchemist said:

It seems to me the headphones are not the issue since this problem did not occur when he used the same components at home.

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