Earphones too quiet, connected to asus mobo's back port

[.Saul]

Hi, I've always used wireless headsets with their own dongle so never had to deal with this so I'm pretty much clueless. 

I have an IEM earphone with an audio jack cable plugged directly in the back port (the lime port) on my ASUS TUF B650 motherboard. It's successfully detected as headphones when plugged in and I chose "small" when when the realtek prompt came up. 

The problem is that the earphones are way too quiet even on max volume. I've verified this by connecting them to my Macbook (old 2020 model) which has a headphone jack and they're way louder on that without any tweaking.

The only way that I've found out that increases the volume by a lot on my Asus mobo is by turning on the "DTS Sound Effects" through the Realtek console. This feature does some virtual surround sound but makes the earphones considerably louder and up to par with the volume on my macbook on stereo. 

I want to use these on Stereo without any DTS or audio enhancements, why are they so quiet on windows 11 with this Asus motherboard?

Here are a few screenshots from the Realtek app:



Turning this DTS thing on makes the earphones louder and normal but adds some virtual surround:

[Cocococo]

Motherboards in general have very weak dac's and amplifiers built in, macs have good inbuilt dac's and amplifiers. If you want a budget friendly solution to your problem then an Apple USB-C to 3.5mm dongle will work great (if you're in the US, apple nerfs the non-USA dongle to 0.5v power) outside of the US the Abigail CX1993 is your best bet, though I've been liking the Fosi DS3 dac recently. For IEM's you don't want the raw power of something like a Schiit Magni amp because its way too easy to spin the volume dial too much and really hurt your ears 

[.Saul]

35 minutes ago, Cocococo said:

Motherboards in general have very weak dac's and amplifiers built in, macs have good inbuilt dac's and amplifiers. If you want a budget friendly solution to your problem then an Apple USB-C to 3.5mm dongle will work great (if you're in the US, apple nerfs the non-USA dongle to 0.5v power) outside of the US the Abigail CX1993 is your best bet, though I've been liking the Fosi DS3 dac recently. For IEM's you don't want the raw power of something like a Schiit Magni amp because its way too easy to spin the volume dial too much and really hurt your ears 

So if the motherboard is weak why does the volume increase by a lot when I turn on DTS sound effects?

Also I have a 250ohm DT 990 and it's louder than this earphones (18 ohm) with the same motherboard

[Cocococo]

23 minutes ago, .Saul said:

So if the motherboard is weak why does the volume increase by a lot when I turn on DTS sound effects?

Also I have a 250ohm DT 990 and it's louder than this earphones (18 ohm) with the same motherboard

What pair of IEM's are they? ohms are a pretty useless way to measure difficult to drive headphones and frankly a fault in the IEM's is more likely than 96db/mw DT990's getting louder than any IEM i have heard of

[.Saul]

18 minutes ago, Cocococo said:

What pair of IEM's are they? ohms are a pretty useless way to measure difficult to drive headphones and frankly a fault in the IEM's is more likely than 96db/mw DT990's getting louder than any IEM i have heard of

It's Moondrop Chu 2. They sound perfectly loud and clear on Macbook that's why I'm confused... I guess I can borrow a usb-c dongle and try it out before buying. Does it hurt the sound quality at all when I do usb-c to headphone jack instead of direct to headphone jack?

[Cocococo]

23 minutes ago, .Saul said:

It's Moondrop Chu 2. They sound perfectly loud and clear on Macbook that's why I'm confused... I guess I can borrow a usb-c dongle and try it out before buying. Does it hurt the sound quality at all when I do usb-c to headphone jack instead of direct to headphone jack?

Quite the opposite, little dongle dacs often do wonders for PC setups, much as I dislike apple as a company their dacs are some of the best budget out there, they can also solve hissing issues people often have with new PC builds. 

[saintlouisbagels]

13 hours ago, .Saul said:

It's Moondrop Chu 2. They sound perfectly loud and clear on Macbook that's why I'm confused... I guess I can borrow a usb-c dongle and try it out before buying. Does it hurt the sound quality at all when I do usb-c to headphone jack instead of direct to headphone jack?

Okay those IEM are way more sensitive than your headphones. Seems to be something wrong with the way your motherboard detects them?

 

You said you set them to small? I don’t like that. For AVR (Home Theater), when you set speakers to small, you’re not sending the full sound to the speakers.

 

Anyways, the Apple USB-C to 3.5mm adapter is the golden crown of the audiophile world. It powers the 250 ohm DT990 perfectly. The dongle is BOTH a DAC/headphone amplifier (otherwise known as a soundcard for PC folk), so you’ll be bypassing the motherboard sound entirely.

[.Saul]

4 hours ago, saintlouisbagels said:

Anyways, the Apple USB-C to 3.5mm adapter is the golden crown of the audiophile world. It powers the 250 ohm DT990 perfectly. The dongle is BOTH a DAC/headphone amplifier (otherwise known as a soundcard for PC folk), so you’ll be bypassing the motherboard sound entirely.

unfortunately i don't live in the US so I'm not sure how to distinguish the correct version of the apple USB-C adapter as someone said above.
This is what i set to small, it pops up when I plug in the earphones.

[saintlouisbagels]

9 hours ago, .Saul said:

unfortunately i don't live in the US so I'm not sure how to distinguish the correct version of the apple USB-C adapter as someone said above.
This is what i set to small, it pops up when I plug in the earphones.

So.. have you tried Large yet?

Saying you "don't live in the US" is not useful information. There a lot of countries in the world.

 

Did you try to search for "Abigail CX1993" like @Cocococo recommended?

[.Saul]

1 hour ago, saintlouisbagels said:

So.. have you tried Large yet?

 

I have, I can't tell any difference between Auto/Small/Large. They're all very quiet at max volume until I turn on "DTS Sound Effects" then they become loud enough but with an added DTS processed surround sound effect.

I've already found somewhere that sells the US version of the Apple usb-c dongle so I'll give that a try.