phonebook_

i swear to god i just figured it out. its been three weeks with this thing. that sound card never really fit in the case (to screw it in it was a little tilted where it shoudl be seated in the pcie x1 slot). i did some old school push them headphone into the jack a little harder and it did some old school sounding better. definitely not subjective this time. i can turn the bad quality on and off. YESHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

ive always been a po boy but have developed a taste for at least not horrible audio equipment. were talking an asus xonar dgx and a qc3 (~$450). i thought this would sound pretty good. its unbearable. i dont even wear the headphones. motherboard is asus M4A88T-M. i've tried everything. i eventually completely reinstalled windows 7 to make sure there wasn't some other software causing the problem. the problem persists. so im on a clean install of 7 with new qc3's and a new xonar dgx. i'll have to wait till tomorrow to flash the bios to a newer version. i expect that to be of no help whatsoever. there is an echo. vocals in music are extremely quiet while banging tin canny guitars are overwhelming like blasting a cheap boom box from 1978. its bloody horrible. i can't hear it on a decent pair of desk speakers but on the qc3's it's very noticeable. any idea what could be causing this?