Koto

Depending on the type of gaming you are doing, Monoprice Retro's might be worth looking at. They have a lot of bass which should be good for rap music but not for competitive gaming. It might be hard to find a headphone that will work well for both competitive gaming and have the sound signature most people want for rap music. They are very cheap as well. $25 plus $25 for pads that aren't awful. Here is a review by another member on the forum.

Was able to find these.

Some more information would be helpful. What headphones? What source are you plugging them into? Have you tried different sources? Are you using any sort of adapters between the headphone and the source? If it only happens on one source, have you installed any software that might mess with the audio?

Headphones.com has a 365 day return policy, but they only sell fairly high end audio products which is pretty niche and not general electronics. Still impressive though.

These are kind of in your price range if you are okay with getting them from Ebay for around $290 new or $250 open box. I have the Klipsch RP-150M's and they are really great, but they aren't powered speakers so you will need an amp and speaker wire. Depending on the amps you already have, they might have speaker outs. If not they are real easy to drive so something cheap like the SMSL SA-36A will power them fine or maybe even a Lepy LP-2024A-HA. They are not super bassy but have pretty good bass and I am sure they will sound alot better than your HD 598's, Its hard to compare speakers and headphone sound but I was pretty impressed when I got them and they were beating my HD 800's in alot of scenarios.

Unless you have high end headphones, something like this should do the trick. No real reason to pay $80 for something. https://www.amazon.com/Sabrent-External-Adapter-Windows-AU-MMSA/dp/B00IRVQ0F8/

The letter spacing is a bit odd and that notch on the bottom slanted bar of the E's could be smoothed.

I have Nord and its good. There is also ProtonVPN that provides a free tier of their VPN but it's probably pretty slow. If privacy is why you want a VPN then I don't recommend a US based vpn like PIA or a VPN within any of the 14 eyes even. Some good information about VPN's and providers (Some data might not be up to date.): https://www.privacytools.io/#ukusa https://thatoneprivacysite.net/vpn-comparison-chart/

It's possible to do with an AutoHotkey script.

There is Kdenlive which is made by KDE and Blender can also edit videos. As for running Windows software on Linux you can use Wine, but don't expect it to work well or at all with everything.

OnePlus is following the Apple trends though.

There are openbox SHP9500's for $53 here. Monoprice retros are good too but I personally like the SHP's alot better.

The Steam version is also DRM free.

Do you really want every video game to use an always online DRM?

I personally can't really say for sure whether or not it be an noticeable dfference in quality since I have not heard that motherboard output but from my experience motherboard outputs aren't very good, even the ones that say they have hi-fi audio and all that, and an external dac/amp is definitely an improvement. I would check out this thread for more recommendations as they are more knowledgeable on the subject than me but I find Schiit's stuff to be really good.