I built an O2 headphone amp!

[TheFlyingRaccoon]

I recently built a O2 headphone amp. If you haven't heard of it before here is more information. The entire project only took me about 4 hours and the finished products looks great!

The O2 sounds great with my Beyerdynamics DT770 250ohm headphones. However I was looking for a DAC to use with it. The built in DAC in my laptop is pretty sub par and I was looking to see if a DAC would improve sound quality.  My candidates so far are the Behringer UCA202, HiFiMeDIY Sabre, and the Stoner Labs UD100. If any of you headphone guys could  give me feedback on a good DAC to use that would be great. Thanks!

[noisyturtle]

Nice blue aluminum case. Yeah, most laptop DACs suck and you can't just get a new sound card. Really anything will be a noticeable improvement, so you really shouldn't over think it or spend too much. Just grab something like a FiiO and enjoy your new amp, I bet everything sounds 1000x better now already

[TheFlyingRaccoon]

Nice blue aluminum case. Yeah, most laptop DACs suck and you can't just get a new sound card. Really anything will be a noticeable improvement, so you really shouldn't over think it or spend too much. Just grab something like a FiiO and enjoy your new amp, I bet everything sounds 1000x better now already

It really does! The DT770s are balanced, but everything seems more "separated" and "open" and the bass sounds so much better. Thanks for your input on the DAC!

[Melvang]

Creative labs used to make a couple sound cards for laptops.  I think they had a USB and a PCMIA version.

[tp4tissue]

building a good dac is hard.

Definately go the Optical route.. isolating noise from USB ports is very hard.

[fydo]

This looks like a really cool project! Did you just buy a kit from somewhere or did you have to source out the parts yourself?