What's sad about this is that there's plenty of room to really improve things with standard CD resolution audio, particularly getting your DAC outside of your computer and on its own power supply. This tends to give better bass and a lower noise floor.

I still have strong memories of the Pentium-class Dell box I used in grad school. I had bottom-of-the-line Grado Labs headphones plugged into the SoundBlaster card, and it was just awful. Every time I scrolled a window, the sound card exploded in noise. I could "hear" the graphics card working. When I switched to the audio jack on the built-in CD player, it was fantastic, clean and beautiful.

These days, I've got a Teac USB amp (related empeg thread from a year ago). I ditched my boomy bookshelf speakers and hauled up to my office a pair of beautiful VMPS RM2's that I bought years ago and hadn't been using recently because my lovely wife found them to be a visual eyesore. Well, that tiny little Teac drives those monster VMPS speakers with aplomb. And my home office isn't all that large, so I don't really need to crank the audio....