Sennheiser HD558 + Titanium HD

Ive heard nothing but praise from them. Their rating on Amazon is 4.5/5, but the Sennheiser HD 598 are that much better, but a lot more expensive.

what is your aim for the sound card? the titanium hd is a very nice card but if your primary aim is music id opt for the xonar essence from asus. you will see better quality sound in music with it. If your aim is to game mostly and music some then yeah the Titanium HD will be the choice imo.

I have heard sooo many bad things about creatives drivers and some fiasco where they are not supporting the Titanium HD cards anymore??

cuz it's discontinued and they want to push their new Quadcorecrap cards.

but if you really want a reason not to buy it. Certain TiHD's dying after a year+ of usage is not unheard of.

Personally I would go with the Sennheiser 598's and a Xonar DG\X depending on your motherboard.

The 598's would work well. The have good positioning if you play FPS's and a sound great for music unless you need a ton of bass.

There is nothing wrong with X-Fi's drivers. They were fixed long ago. And yes they are still supported, in fact Creative made it quite clear that X-Fi was going to remain their top audio card for sound enthusiasts. Fact is, the X-Fi chip was the most advanced audio processor ever created for consumer use when it was released in 2005 and still reigns as one of the top money can buy to date. Creative's new SoundCore can't touch the quality of X-Fi, hence SoundCore being aimed only at gamers, while Creative's "enthusiast" line remains X-Fi. I've owned many, many sound cards, including nearly ever Asus sound card they've made to date, along with Auzentech's line - the ones using the X-Fi chip, and the ones not using the X-Fi chip, and I always go back to my original PCI X-Fi elite pro and the new X-Fi Titanium HD.

SoundCore is completely based off a DSP processor which also keeps the DAC and everything else on ONE chip and has a much lower SNR ratio than X-Fi, it was never meant to compete with X-Fi in the audiophile realm. Fact is, X-Fi HD is one of the finest consumer audio cards ever produced. Also the HD's hardware had a slight revision from Titaniums which fixed the final few nagging glitches left over from the original X-Fi chip, and the Titanium X-Fi chip, and uses a completely different driver and software suite than X-Fi and X-Fi titanium.

Short answer is, Titanium HD out classes Asus's cards both in paper specifications and in drivers. Asus has had their own fair share of driver issues, just as creative has, one look on their forums shows as much. The entire Vista/7 audio platform caught all soundcard companies by surprise and they scrambled to try and fix it. I just hope with Windows 8 things go smoother as Windows 8 has yet another completely revamped audio platform, which brings back some hardware acceleration to boot.

As for the headphones, The HD 558's are sweet cans, but I much prefer my HD 595's and the HD 598's.