>>51319110
What headphones you got?
Whats your budget? Source material?

I have one of those USB soundcards OP.
Works perfectly fine.

>>51319110
>What headphones you got?

Sennheiser HD 205-II (Not the best, I know but I found them on clearance)
>Whats your budget?

~$50 (maybe more but I'd have to scrape from my food budget)
>Source material?
320kps mp3 and some flac ranging from really shitty jap shit to classic rock

>>51319110
I have one of those. It sucked. Having a long(ish) circuit board supporting an audio cable through a usb port is not the best idea in the world - shit breaks.

>>51319301
>>51319419
Yeah, I know. These sound like a wind turbine in your ear

Get a cheap Amp/DAC combo like a Fiio E10K.

I bought one of those. Took like a month to get here from china. When I plugged it in my headphones got really hot and stopped working, then the sound card stopped working, then the thing litterally fell apart cuz it's made in china. Do not buy.

>>51319564
Those have a really high mark up from local retailers and massdrop stopped shipping here, so I'm SOL
Any online retailer that ships internationally for cheap?

>>51319564
>Fiio E10K
What does this offer in terms of quality increase?

I have a pair of HD 518's. Are they too low quality overall to get a boost from using a Amp/DAC?

>>51319110
If you use desktop, then buy PCI/PCI-E audio adapter with headphone AMP. Cheapest that I can recommend is ASUS Xonar DG/DGX (first one for PCI and second for PCI-E). But if you have laptop then go for USB DAC/AMP like FiiO E10K.

>>51320158
Desktop, but I don't have an open pci port because the built in NIC died and I had to put a new network card
As for the FiiO DAC/AMP >>51319926

>>51319110
Cheapest yeah there's a $5.99 usb sound card like your picture on Amazon. Probably even less on eBay. My experience is it works fine but the volume control is shit and it seems to have a subtle EQ curve built-in.

My recommendation would be that if you have a PC with a PCI slot (not PCIe), you should just pick up an old SB Audigy2 ZS on eBay. Probably $20 and best price/performance in terms of audio quality. Also it has great Linux support.

>>51319110
Get a cheap fiio, i love mine

>>51319110
I have some of these.
The plastic fell off of all of them because they are chinese.
I bought 5, they were $0.99 each.

No, these are not good enough to drive decent headphones, as they also create static and sound horrible.

>>51320372
> Cheapest yeah there's a $5.99 usb sound card like your picture on Amazon
> Buying Chinese gear in the USA
That's a $2 sound card on Aliexpress.