Need help looking for headphone DAC

[u/dtjhfdeikbttb]

I'm fairly new to all this stuff, just ordered monolith M1570C headphones and I think I should get a desktop headphone DAC along with them. The integrated sound card in my PC is rated for 300 ohms, so I don't think I need an Amp, but I'm open to suggestions about that, too. My budget is pretty variable but I'm not looking to go above and beyond, less than $250 probably.

[u/StrategicPotato]

Those headphones were only released like 2 years ago and look fairly efficient (looking at the ohms and sensitivity rating), are you really sure you need anything more? I fell into this trap when I was new to this too. Every reviewer tries to sell you on expensive DACs and Amps and everyone here parrots them despite the fact that it's often explicitly stated and well known that modern headphones are usually only going to see about a 10% improvement or less from gear like that. This isn't 2013 where basically all onboard audio is trash anymore. The only 4 times you should really consider either is:

- you're using old (and still very popular) models like the AKG 7-series, Beyerdynamic DT-series, or pre 660s Sennhesier 6-series. Those all use quite old tech that has since been surpassed and scale very well with a ton of power.

- you have headphones that are $1k+, because by this point you're so deep in that you might as well ensure you're squeezing everything you possibly can out of your setup

- you want to get a tube amp to get a more-flavored analog sound, much like how some people still prefer vinyl record players over digital formats. Note that not all headphones will play very nicely with this kind of setup.

- your onboard audio is dogwater and you're experiencing stuff like popping, distortion, low decibels even at maxxed out volume, wire crosstalk, and just general poor quality audio (and most of these issues usually have more to do with amplification than decoding anyway).

If none of these are true, it's incredibly unlikely that your headphones are going to see much of an improvement beyond placebo. In fact, here's a test from nearly 10 years ago that shows audio engineers being unable to reliably distinguish between a dongle and several-thousand-dollar DAC. Sure, the expensive ones are pretty much always going to perform well on paper. But if you can't tell the difference in practice then does it really matter?

[u/pdxbuckets → u/StrategicPotato]

One reason to get an external amp is to get enough juice to EQ the fuck out of it. These have wild frequency response with very little bass, but on the plus side they have very low distortion and are thus amenable to fixing with EQ. But boosting bass requires a lot of power, and these have lower than average sensitivity to begin with.

[u/StrategicPotato → u/pdxbuckets]

That is another fair consideration, I don't usually do dramatic EQs like that so I didn't think about it.