First of all, I want to clarify that I’m not an audio expert—just an enthusiast—so don’t expect anything too scientific or magical from what I’m about to share. For a long time, I used an old SoundBlaster X-Fi (honestly, nothing special) connected through its RCA outputs and adapted to 3.5 mm. Eventually, I decided to upgrade to a FiiO BTR15 DAC, expecting a clear improvement. To my surprise, with newer and supposedly better hardware, I couldn’t initially reach the audio quality I was used to with the SoundBlaster.

Spoiler alert: this journey turned out to be way crazier than expected. Audio is not always as “plug and play” as one might hope. After digging deeper and carefully reviewing configurations, I finally found a few parameters that made a very noticeable difference in sound quality.