It's not sound quality. It's my headphones.

If these were the early 2000s. We would have said that having a sound card is a flex. With good reason, too. You'd slap one into your PC, crank up a media player, and pretend you were mastering audio.

Onboard audio has gotten decent over the past decade. Motherboard manufacturers have been quietly dropping better Realtek codecs and op-amps onto their boards, and for casual listening or gaming with ...