Hi everyone, I just received my hd598, and I was wondering a few things, I lurked a bit and due to my newness to this hobby I'm a bit lost still, I'm also quite slow on taking decisions usually so I definitely thought I'd ask this time around before staying months without taking a decision:
I'm an avid gamer but not of fps, mostly mmos/rts/moba/old games, and I love music, I was kinda used on having crappy headsets like the 7h usb from steelseries (which by the way is probably the worst thing ever made, broke twice in less than 2 months, and I treat my headphones better than myself, had an old creative pair hold up for 6 years living through a damn earthquake with things falling on them so yeah -_-) so I'm now a bit confused on how to get the best out of the hd 598.
I have an old x-fi soundcard but had a lot of issues with my old pc, mainly it went into conflict with my ati video card, and is now sitting besides me.It's an xtrememusic, which I believe it was a bad deal at the time and is now old and generally crappy, so now I'm thinking to upgrade but I'm not sure if I should buy a new x-fi titanium for gaming, or go for an asus STX and not bother with creative drivers anymore.I'm running w7 64bit so I'm worried there might be issues, and I've been told the stx is generally a better product.I was also thinking on getting a fiio e17 to supplement it, but I'm totally new to external amp/dacs and generally new to being an audiophile.
I read many topics about stx vs x-fi and read many topics about the fiio dacs but still I don't get if it'd be worth to buy them together.Bear in mind I'm a lot sensitive about volume and usually can't bear to go past 50% on windows with a realtek card(motherboard is some gaming thing, should be an Asus Maximus IV Extreme Rev3.0 Socket 1155 Intel P67 DDR3 SATA3 USB3 ATX, not sure what realtek it builds, but for today is good enough).I was even tempted to try the usb connector of the 7h since the audio is really not that great I think with my setup...Also I've got a lot of bad mp3 but that is another issue, plus the headphones need some burn-in still.
I still got time also to get it back to amazon after trying it with a soundcard and/or dac/amp since I should have between 10-30 days to send it back, so if I get some suggestions I could use a 1day shipping and try out the setup before committing 100%.I had considered a q701 but it costs 2x the price of the hd 598 so yeah...I'd consider doing the change only if the sound wasn't really satisfying after some tweaks
I'm gonna keep lurking around so maybe I can find some answers but some help would be awesome since I'm confused on some of the technical parts still...
edit: forgot a detail, a portable dac/amp could help with my ipod, got an old video one with like 80gb of space, and I love to use it, I just hate the terrible sound quality it has usually...still haven't tried with some serious headphones though.Maybe these opens aren't the best idea but still, would be an investment for the future!