Raintech

Music headphones: Sennheiser HD6xx Gaming headphones: Beyerdynamics DT990/250ohm Amp/Dac: Objective2 SDAC/ODAC Microphone: Blue yeti Mic boomstand: Rhode PSA1 @op, you probably want to specify a budget and what you want from audio. Most Audiophile-grade headphones perform vastly different to gaming headsets, generally considered much better quality across the board. Here's a link to the audio board's thread on recommended gear, and a link to one of my favorite videos on cheaper starter audio gear if you're looking to get yourself an audiophile grade headphone to start out; You'll be blown away by the vast step up in audio quality going from a gaming headset to audiophile headphones. (Funnily enough the AKG k240's mentioned by Heats with Nvidia above appears in the very first recommendation of the youtube video) If you need a microphone to slap on, I stand behind the antlion modmic as an easy solution to stick onto any headphone listed if you don't want to buy a standalone desk mic.

From a useability perspective, I'd honestly not suggest a lavmic, more fragile, more hassle to take on/off, has a bit of a skill ceiling to choose strategic placement points where clothes/collars/limbs wont rustle into the mic, and you might run into compatibility as alot of popular lavs have a TRS connector which isn't designed for plugging into a PC. Modmic is a great option if you're happy with your current headphones and just looking to add a microphone to it. It's literally purpose built for you scenario, and has great quality. For example alot of standalone mic's like the blue snowball retail for around 50~60usd, so depending what issues you're having with the mic, you could consider getting a boomarm or stand for the current mic to upgrade it's useability? Again this depends on what you have and issues you're facing. As for headsets with decent mic's, for purely gaming and voice chats, you will find the vast majority of headset mics at that price range will be acceptable; It'd honestly be a shorter list to point out the ones with subpar audio quality than the ones with adequate quality. A dedicated mic for gaming has always been pretty overkill in my experience. Generally no one on voice calls notices the difference between a "good" mic, and a simple "average" mic, especially after compression with discord's OPUS codec Honestly, the best thing for maximising your outgoing Discord/VOIP call quality in my experience is just trying to minimise background audio, as none of your friends will appreciate hearing your keyboard sounds, mouse clicking, or even hearing you breathe into the mic (which happens often with headset mic's). Hence why standalone mic's benefit alot IMHO from boomstands to bring them up and away from your keyboard, and lav mic's could be a bad idea depending on your seating position, as having the lav closer to your keyboard could result in more keyboard noises. Basically, easiest solution is the modmic. Buy it, slap it on, and you're done. Mic quality is well above average, and like I said above, VOIP's compression will render anything better, or any of the snobby "hi res audio" stuff completely moot. In my experience the modmic sounds alot warmer and breathes more life into your voice after compression, but again, that's my personal opinion, and your friends may think a warmer audio signature of the mic sounds worse to them. Otherwise, if you need to buy a standalone headset, as long as you're not looking to record audio for hobby/professional media work, don't stress about the quality of the mic too much. As long as reviews generally call the microphone "clear", your discord buddies probably won't notice much difference in quality. Yes your voice may sound different as microphones all have a distinct sound signature, like warmer or cooler, but that doesn't fall within the range of "better or worse". It's just different. Instead think of the other, much more important aspects like comfort(important!), build quality, audio quality of the headphone part itself (VERY important) and other design features of the headset, like close back or open back.

Plug your headphones into the rear IO port directly into your motherboard. Avoid plugging your headphones into any ports which may have poor shielding, this includes USB hubs, front ports on your tower, passthrough ports on your keyboard. Plug straight into the back of your PC for best results. The reason is the front port of your tower is likely using a passthrough wire that runs internally insdie the tower, before plugging into the motherboard. This wire is usually sub optimally shielded, and could be wedged up near a half dozen tower fans before plugging into your motherboard. Fans are notorious for kicking off all sorts of electro and magnetic disturbances which could affect sensitive audio signals. Same with keyboard RGB passthroughs on your keyboard; The passthrough wire runs alongside or inside the same sleeve as the power cables which power the RGB lights, as well as the cables powering and sending your keyboard signals, again, kicking off possible disturbances. Basically, plugging directly into the back of your PC ensures you go straight to your motherboard, and isolates any possibility of external interferance. If none of those fix the issue, it could be your motherboard's DAC itself is poorly shielded. In which case you can try to move around where your peripherals are plugged in, or try unplugging certain non essential fan headers to see if you can isolate the issue.

Update on this thread, ended up going to my local store, it's pretty hard to trial headphones right now with all the covid stuff going on, but I listened to the DT880/250's and although I liked it, found the DT990/250's a bit more refreshing. Definitely alot more fun. Boomier base, and suuuuuper sharp were the first things the DT990's threw at me. Perhaps less detailed than the 880's but plenty good enough. I've decided to keep the 6xx's as my daily driver music cans, and to pickup the DT990's for gaming and as a change of pace for music when bored. The staging on the DT990's is insane, everything sounds way wider, both music and gaming. Nearby audio sounds alot NEARER, and further audio cues sound alot further than compared to the 6xx. Defnitely alot better on staging is my first impression, the audio feels alot more sidewards. Like music comes from both sides, more than from the 6xx where it feels like everything comes from straight ahead. Probably just the wider staging which I'm not used to yet. Songs with audio elements that rapidly switch from one ear to another (like certain EDM tracks) are really fun on the DT's compared to the sennheisers. Probably also helps that I've been using in-ears alot the past year, they really can't compare to actual cans. The sharp treble makes footsteps a LOT more noticeable in games, and the bass somehow also feels less boomy and echoey, but also punchier at the same time, again, all positives for directional staging. I think I'll really enjoy these for gaming, no issues with treble fatigue so far, but I've gone ahead and applied a slight EQ down on the treble and a slight EQ to raise the mids. Will probably finetune the EQ to my preference over the next few weeks and months. My store gives me a 30 day change of mind refund so I'll see if any treble fatigue develops with the DT990's and I can always go back to picked the 880's if I prefer, but the 990's were on sale for about 30% off, so I'm happy with the value on these so far. First day of using them has indeed been very comfortable. Appreciate all the answers and help on the thread, ended up adding the DT990 250ohm PRO to my possession, been using it for a few hours so far.

Yeah I want to stress that your headphone is responsible for the majority of your audio improvement, assuming you're not using absolute garbage audio files. You'll never experience quite as big of an audio jump as going from cheap gamer headphones, to a audiophile headphone ever again. So keep that in mind as you make all future purchases, to put the audio gains we're talking about into perspective. If you are not planning on buying other headphones, any gains from a DAC or amp for purely your 58x would be small, so keep in mind the cost to performance gains here have steep diminishing returns. Especially the DAC, many people don't even recommend a DAC until you're above 1000 dollars total invested in the hobby. The main advantage of getting an amp is that you'll have a lot more choices in the future, as it let's you buy a greater variety of headphones. So from a beginner audio collector perspective, an amp is an investment for the future, whilst giving you peace of mind in the present. There's alot to be said for putting yourself at ease with your current gear and knowing you have a setup that'll work with the majority of future headphones. In any case, I would experiment with plugging your 58x straight into your motherboard's 3.5mm rear io slot and see if you like the audio from that better than your dongle; And compare the volume; The claims that dongle has an amp in it seems a little far fetched to me, or at the least it's probably only marginally stronger than most PC's motherboards. I personally have an inherant distrust of most portable dongles of that form factor, and wouldn't put it past companies to put this kind of this stuff on their pages as pure marketting BS. Plus, I just don't think it makes much sense to use a cheap, little portable solution like those dongles when your PC has fully fledged, perfectly modern, full sized hardware available.

Honestly, now that you've got yourself a HD58x, which is a true audiophile grade headphone by the way, leagues better than most "gamer headphone" trash on the market, I'd think you'd gain a decent bit of audio quality adding in a desktop dac/amp combo. Not nearly as big of a step as going from non-audiophile headsets to a real audiophile headphone, but it's probably logical next step in your journey towards audiophile-ville. I'm not sure if those little dongles are much better than your average PC onboard DAC these days; In fact, I'd honestly try to avoid them. You say they're plugged into a USB-C port? That worries me. You see, that means your PC is outputting a Digital signal (which is what comes out of USB ports, data in the form of 1's and 0's). What that means is the dongle is therefore handling the Digital to Analogue Conversion; Read those again: Digital Analogue Conversion. DAC. Turning those 1's and 0's into a signal for your headphones. That 100% means you're running off of that tiny dongle's DAC. I wouldn't trust it at ALL. Honestly, PC motherboard DAC's have come a long way in the past couple decades, and chances are your motherboard has a perfectly great DAC on it; A full sized, good chip on the motherboard. To instead rely on a tiny dongle's portable DAC is just incredibly sketchy. Many people report the 58x runs just fine out of their phone or PC's onboard without needing an amp to sound good, or loud. Have you tried just the onboard motherboard? And as an owner of a phone which doesn't have a 3.5mm jack (thanks apple for starting that trend btw, I have a samsung s20 fe), I can tell you that my usb-c to 3.5mm dongle that I use with my phone sounds NOTICEABLY worse than my desktop's dac/amp setup, like jawdroppingly different; It's like someone's playing music through their phone line, like the awful elevator music companies play when you get placed on hold; but that's comparing a desktop setup to my phone dongle, even with the same IEM's used for both. And this is an expensive dongle advertised as "hifi" and "lossless" which i picked up off amazon for about 35 dollars. Just goes to show amazon pages chuck those catch words on basically any kind of turd these days. I ended up getting myself a fiio BTR5, which is far more expensive than your budget but something you can look at if you want to see what a truly decent protable dac/amp costs; Not those terrible cheapo dongles that they sell on amazon. Volume doesn't necessarily always mean you're gettting the most out of your headphone either, even without factoring in crappy DAC's. Headphones can sound tinny and lacking bass or clarity out of a weak amp/amp less setup, even if you can push them loud enough. so adding an amp in your scenario might still be a good idea, then just letting your onboard PC motherboard's DAC handle the digital converting. Just make sure you're never accidentally make a huge mistake with where you plug in your headphones; Like I've seen people plugging 3.5mm cables into their keyboard's RGB passthrough with piss poor shielding where they can legit hear when their RGB lights pulse. Or people who plug into their PC tower's front 3.5mm port, and that 3.5mm port has an extension cable running internally through the whole tower, straight past like 6 tower fans with barely any shielding before plugging into the motherboard. Fans are notorious for causing electrical interferance. For that kind of budget, there's not many dac/amp combos I can think of that would be really worth buying and keeping in terms of future proofing. As an audio-nooby myself, I can say I do highly recommend my Objective 2's. Been using it for a bit less than 2 years now; It offers supposedly "truly uncolored" sound output, which I think is really nice for starting out; You can really listen to headphones and music the way those headphones and artists intend and form accurate opinions, then add in EQ to make things fun after the fact if you want, and I totally agree after experiencing it first hand. Like seeing the world through crystal clear glasses, before adding in your own fun tints and shades later. The Objective 2 SDAC from massdrop is pretty decent value, usually goes for about 150 usd, but it goes on sale really often. And as with most things Massdrop, its only in stock from time to time when a Drop is going on. I remember I got mine during the pre-2019 xmas sales, it was down to 120 USD, and then I got it part of a bundle with my HD6XX's for about 95 usd ontop of the headphones. You could look out for the next drop and see what the price comes to; Usually more signups on the drop the cheaper. But the Schiit Fulla combo DAC/amp also could be worth looking into. Colors the sound which could throw off the way headphones are meant to sound, and despite being super cheap, most reviewers tend to sound quite snobby with it and say it doesn't compare well with their expensive dac/amp solutions; But obviously this is a scenario you're kind of getting what you're paying for. I personally didn't like the reviews on it, but seems like a useable budget option. Personally I found myself alot more tempted to get the Schiit Magni and Schiit Modi, which are schiit's entry level standalone amp, and standalone DAC respectively. But even a single one of those would already almost blow your whole budget. But the great thing about 2 standalones is the versatility, you could always just buy the Magni standalone amp for 99 usd RRP (according to their site, probably cheaper if you shop around), and add the schiit Modi standalone DAC later if you feel like it, but again, just the standalone amp would already offload DAC duties off to your PC's motherboard, which is probably perfectly good for the job; The idea is to stop relying on that little dongle's DAC asap. Buying the schiit standalones should also be more future proof in the long run too; I honestly think with just the Magni amp, you would come to a very adequate stopping point where you could live without buying anymore upgrades and be happy with your current sound forever; Unless you decide you've caught the audio bug and get deeper into this expensive hobby; Once you have the schiit magni, or similar entry level amp, your current setup would be plenty decent enough to be a stopping point and you could just live with it, but at the same time, it would also be easy to upgrade and have clear upgrade paths should you decide to spend more.

I gamed on an i7 3770k until middle of last year; And as an accomplished PC builder, I watched the market for all 8 years and never felt the need for an upgrade; And followed all the new processors in that entire timespan, I feel like I am more qualified to chime in here than almost anyone else. As someone who lived with, and gamed with the i7 3770k almost daily for 8 years, I can tell you first hand exactly what to expect from these generation of parts. Even in the past half year after upgrading to an 11th gen i5, I have not felt much of an increased performance from my CPU. If you're planning to allocate any amount of budget in upgrading the planned rigs, you're best off following the number 1 rule of building a gaming rig; Allocate the biggest budget to your graphics card. I would say that holds more true in your case than anything else combined. In my 8 years experience of running the i7 3770k fropm 2013 until 2021, majority of that time of which it was paired with a GTX680 : I can tell you the 3rd gen processor felt plenty powerful, and I played minecraft extensively throughout several of those years so I can speak first hand for that title. It was the GTX680 that was screaming and dying in newer games; as soon as I upgraded to my GTX1080, the old i7 3770k kept trucking along just fine, and honestly still would to this day if I didn't upgrade still. I did not feel like any game would have benefitted all that greatly from the added CPU processing power. Hyperthreading is nice, but honestly it tends to be only a fairly minor upgrade in performance, even in games like minecraft. Minecraft is considered quite CPU dependant and benefits from more cores/hyperthreading, but even then you're not going to see double the framerate from having an i7 over an i5. Maybe in the moderate 10% fps increase. Plus I'm assuming you're not going to be giving her any crazy high refresh rate monitor anyway, so she'll be running between 30~60 fps which is extremely easy for even this generation of processors to push, and assuming you'll be giving her a cheapish 60htz display anyway, there's no reason to aim for higher unles she's got aspirations to be a competitive FPS player or something where input lag matters to her (which is the main benefit of a higher fps above the display's refresh rate) For this generation of CPU's especially, it's well documented by now that the RAM, and Motherboard have minimal effect on gaming FPS, only on overclocking performance. And even though these chips do overclock well, it's actually not necessary to flog these older chips unless you're an enthusiast and enjoy overclocking; It's too much hassle, and risk of instability in a family member's rig just causes more headaches incase of bluescreens and crashes in the longrun. I would not bother doing anything but the mildest overclocks on these chips, and mild overclocks give almost negligible FPS improvements, especially again, as your main bottleneck is going to the GPU based, not CPU based. And even if you did overclock, the extra money spent on K-series CPU, beefy cooloers and fans, better PSU's and better motherboard chipsets; At the end of the day the parts needed to overclock reliably honestly detracted from any cost-efficiency claims that overclocking could have held. Again, not worth the effort of overclocking, especially on a rig where if something goes wrong your daughter has to come whining to you. That 660ti is the ONLY part you should be considering replacing. Until you replace that gpu, don't even think about spending even a dime on anything else. So unless your daughter is a snob who requires 200+ FPS to play and have fun, she'll be fine running vanilla or light minecraft modpacks with the current processors you described. From memory, my i7 3770k and GTX1080 combo was pulling around 90~100 FPS with moderate settings in vanilla minecraft, in closed spaces, with rare dips to 30 fps during explosions. Your daughter's currrent rig should be within ~20% of my old rig. The GTX660ti is by far the weakest link here, and evidence of this will stick out like a sore thumb once she pushes this kind of rig with even a moderately graphic-intense game. In fact, I would wager even the newest Sims games will display some signs of this. I would say use whatever board and cpu you currently own, and let your daughter grow into some more graphically intense games, and when she does, keep that fund ready for a GPU upgrade. So even though this is a gross oversimplification; I would say the 3rd gen i5 is fine to handle anything up to a GTX 970, or GTX 1060. Only once you find yourself with a GPU of that spec or better, should you look into a CPU upgrade. If my 3770k felt like a good compliment to, or at least, only a smallish bottleneck to a GTX 1080, the i5 could probably pull adequate gaming FPS with at least a GPU of this spec range. Obviously it'll depend on alot of other factors and the exact title, but this should be your rough average with any new title your daughter may play.

I honestly don't think it matters WHAT speakers you use; Just pick the monitor whose inbuilt speaker sounds better or more enjoyable to you. On a technical windows sound perspective, you just pick a default speaker in windows options, and basically all of your audio will come out that speaker. So even if you're watching something on left/right monitor, the point is you can still hear everything, the sound doesn't necessarily need to come form teh same monitor, right? Imagine if you bought a pair of external speakers, the speakers aren't in the same position as the monitor you're watching from. It doesn't really matter to most people! That's one of the characteristics of using a speaker by the way, especially a dual speaker system which you can't reposition, you just get frontal sound and you can hear the singular direction it's coming from; usually, from directly in front of you, or form this case, from one of your monitors! If you want to upgrade to a "in both ears no matter where you turn your head" sound experience, try plugging in whatever earbuds/headphones/headset that you may have lying around. Most phones come with a free pair of earbuds, and those will probably be a upgrade from your monitor's inbuilt speakers. This would also solve your immersion issues if the whole "sound is coming from the wrong direction" issue bothers you. Obviously, headphones follow your head, so will sound more natural despite which monitor your head is facing.

I'll definitely check out the Tygr 300r's too. Appreciate the responses. I'll probably go to my local store and ask to try out both the 880 and the 990, and see how the prices compare. From their online website, the 990's are on sale, which will probably tip the balance for me. They're about 66% of the price of the 880's, and that seems like a good value deal to me. I do hear alot of people who own the DT's suggest the 880 as the best for critical listening, but I'm not exactly sure that's what I'm after with these. Prior to this thread i probably would have bought the 990's from a comfort perspective with no 2nd thoughts, so I'll make sure to give the 880's a nice hard listen and see what I think of them inperson. My main concern with the 880's is they might remind me too much of my HD6xx's (acoustically the same as hd650 as riceguru's reference). Even though I love my HD6xx's, it might make it hard for me to justify keeping both headphones around and harder to choose which one I'd want for a specific purpose. Kind of like having 2 similarly sized hammers in the toolshed. But hey, if i like th hd6xx, I might love the 880s, alot of reviews seem to describe both in similar fashions, balanced, natural sounding headphones. Obviously, one has the Sennheiser signature sound that i'm used to, and possible getting slightly bored of, whereas, the other has the "Beyer sound" that I'm looking to try out from these, and haven't experienced yet. Plus they seem more comfortable than the 6xx's, so might take over as my new daily drivers if that's the case. If the staging from both are pretty similar I won't have too much remorse from picking between them, as long as it doesn't cause my competitive ingame rankings to decrease. For single player games I'm wondering whether the 990's will sound a bit more fun, whilst still giving me that "beyer sound" experience I'm curious about, and if the same characteristics which make them less desireable than the 880's for critical listening might be a boon for my use case, as a break from my HD6xx's with extra treble and bass and scooped mids, whereas the hd6xx's kind of complements them by almost being the opposite.

If it's still popping even on a wired connection, then it simply CANNOT be an interferance issue, which is very odd for bluetooth to begin with anyway. It sounds most likely to me that the ANC is the issue here, given the electronic nature of the sound you're describing. Try turning off the ANC for a while to test if the pops continue, and if so, it's likely that the firmware/software of the ANC is responding badly to some kind of noise in your building. If that's the case, then there's not much than can be done from your side, apart from waiting for Sony to fine tune or upgrade their firmware again (which may never happen). You have a small chance of trying to find what kind of sound is causing the ANC to pop; The external mics will be picking up something that causes the ANC to feel the need to pop like that. I haven't used these pair of headphones myself I'm afraid, I'm more a buds/IEM user when it comes to bluetooth and portable stuff. But some of my true wireless earbuds have a way to tune the ANC to be less responsive, is there anything of the sort for the Sony's? I'm thinking a possible hack could be even be to put a piece of tape over the microphone to make them less responsive, and seeing if that helps. I hear the big headphones are far more sensitive than the earbuds i'm used to, so it could be worth a shot. My hypothesis is that a hack like this could get rid of the pops by lessening the volume of whatever sound is bugging out the ANC, but will obviously have a negative effect on the ANC as a whole. For example, when listening to the "transparent" mode on one of my true wireless earbuds, my Sennheiser Momentum 2's, flicking a lightswitch produces a godawful, extremely loud electronic "pop" that almost bursts my eardrums, way louder than any music I could play. Just something about the "click" of flipping a lightswitch drives those earbuds' microphones nuts and seems to cause them to peak out. I've since learnt not to use the transparent mode of those indoors. The transparent mode of my other earbuds also sometimes pop for no reason, I can only imagine that ANC software, which uses the same microphones, could also be getting the same garbage-input from the mics, and the software as a result makes strange noises to cancel non-existant noises which the microphone is reporting, but doesn't actually exist.

Assuming this isn't a source file or Bluetooth interference issue, my experience is that these kind of issues occur because a hair strand or large dust particle(s) has found its way inside the enclosure and is touching the driver, but again, extremely odd it has happened in the same ear of 2 different pairs. Check for hairs that may have stabbed through the pads and into the enclosure, and remove them. This is more common with short-medium length, strait hair as it tends to jab straight through pads on rare occasions, but it's a numbers game, with thousands of hair strands, under daily use, it's definitely possible. Try removing the pads at the very least and doing your best to remove any foreign particles to see if that helps, disassembling the headphones to whatever degree you're comfortable, being careful not to damage anything. Another thing is if these have a transparent mode, they may have small, external microphones to pipe in noise from outside. The popping could be the microphones picking up some kind of debris rattling inside the mic on the ear cup. Before pulling apart your headphones, are you sure there's no way for you to test your Bluetooth connection, like trying from your phone instead of PC, or vice versa? Different song? Or even different source file entirely? Try a different location in case of another signal interfering? Try the other side of the building or even outside?

Thanks for the reply. Woah, that's awesome you have all 3 of the DT's. I think having something "different" will be quite important for me in the long term; That way there'll be more reason for me to keep the headphones around, rather than selling one of them because they're too similar. Why do you think the 880's are best if you don't mind me asking? Do you think the 990s treble is too harsh? I assume we're both thinking the same thing here, which is to EQ down the top end a bit on the 990's.

Looking to add one of the Beyerdynamic DT's to my collection, mostly for home listening, and occasional gaming(CSGO and overwatch mostly, soundstage and pinpointing locations are important). Wearing them for long periods is also important, multiple hour gaming sessions for example. I hear they're extremely comfortable but want some more opinions on that. I have an Objective2 SDAC/ODAC, a combination DAC & Amp which claims to be able to power "any headphone on the market" but not sure if those claims can be trusted for the 600 or 800 ohm variants. I currently own: - Sennheiser HD6xx (my current daily driver for at-home listening, but still clamps super tightly and gives me a headache for long sessions) -Audiotechnica ATH M40x (my out-and-about closedbacks, I don't like full closebacks as they make my voice sound all wierd yet don't want to be "taht guy" with super leaky headphones in public) Preference wise, I've found myself enjoying both balanced and bass-forward sound signatures equally. Mostly find myself using a bunch of IEMS from Shure, KZ, and 1more these days. I find the in-ears are more comfortable for long sessions, but find myself missing the better soundstage of the bigger head cans so it's probably time to get something new to try out, and after some searching I've decided its time to add one of the Beyerdynamics DT's to my possession. I love my sennheisers HD6xx's for PC useage; The open back sounds alot more natural to me, and for discord calls doesn't make my voice sound all wierd in my own head which I hate. BUT I absolutely cannot wear these for long hours anymore, as the clamping force is just way too tight, and despite trying to fix the clamping issues (trust me I've tried everything) it just doesn't get better. So looking for something else to wear after I'm tired of the 6xx's clamp, or perhaps something else to daily drive that's a bit of fun. So questions: -How do the various DT's headphones perform for gaming? Not sure if I'll prefer them for gaming over my HD6XX's or not. Both "fun factor" and "locationally accurate" are considerations I'll care about for FPS games (fun sounding gunshots/explosions and directionally locating footsteps etc). Which one would be best for this use-case? -Which of the DT lineup do you guys think will complement my current headphones from a pure audio, "brings something new or fun to the table" music-listening perspective? -Which ohm variant should I get with my Objective2 SDAC/ODAC? I'm thinking 250ohm is a good sweetspot, as I fear the 600 or 800 ohm variants may sound slightly weaker than the 250ohm variants out of my O2 amp. -How's their comfort for long gaming sessions? I only plan on buying 1 of these. Currently leaning towards the 880's or 990's given my preference towards open backs, but the semi closed 880's sound interesting, whereas the 990's are apparently more Vshaped and fun sounding, which sounds like it'll be up my alley for both music and games, given my HD6xx's apparently aren't very bass-forward according to most people, and the DT990's should offer a nice contrast to that as according to frequency response graphs they appear to have a generous amount of bass.

Seems to me it's likely a storage device issue or an overheating issue but it's hard to tell unless you try to diagnose it yourself. Check your windows drive, usualyl your C drive and see if it's throwing any errors through any hard drive managing software that can read it SMART status. Monitor your CPU temperatures and clock speed to see what's going on there. Lastly, check your background appls to make sure nothing is hogging system resources. Usually it's because your antivirus is starting a massive scan which hammers your harddrives to scan them for virus, causing system unresponsivenes (which behaves similar to a slow storage device/fauly storage device). Or windows updates is starting in the background.

Update: Dropped off parts to computer store on Saturday. Sunday is a non business day so it took them until Monday to let me know they think it's a motherboard issue. Apparently my MSI z590-A Pro is defective, and fails to POST most of the time, and even the computer guys have no idea why. Physically there is 0 damage or visible defects on the board. To no ones surprise they were out of stock on this particular board and needed time to order in a replacement. Just picked up my new motherboard, the computer guys have tested it and confirmed it seems fine. Hopefully this board doesn't need to be RMA'd either or I'm swearing off MSI products for the rest of my life. Main takeaway; RMA'ing parts is super stressful and if something doesn't make sense, it's probably due to a defective component and should be taken back to where you purchased it even if its a pain in the ass.