I have just bought a pair of Shure SE530 in ear monitors (earbuds).
Absolutely superb (albeit overpriced). In fact, I'm finding I like
them every bit as much as my trusty 15 year old Stax "earspeakers".

My music is all on my mp3 player and PC these days. I ditched all my
expensive gear a few years ago when I finally admitted to myself that
my ageing ears couldn't tell the difference between 128kbs mp3 and the
originals. Now I will also happily admit that my little Sony flash
player with the Shures sounds every bit as good as anything else I've
ever heard through headphones.

Now I want to be able to plug my Shures into my PC. What I want is a
little desktop DAC/headphone amp with volume control that accepts
either optical or USB iputs from the PC.

The people on Headfi forums - headcases, mostly - are well meaning but
many have lost the plot and obsess about things like thickening of
decaying transients in the lower mid registers etc etc

Does anyone have any advice on something that is reasonably
prefessionally designed and built and will do the job? Prices vary
from £50 (for the Headstage Lyrix) to the price of a family holiday,
all for a bag of bits that'd cost about £10 from Maplins. Then there
are professional USB soundcards like Behringer, E-MU etc, with lots of
flashing lights and connections, but apparently "poorly designed
headphone outputs".

On a related point, these "Headfiers" plug in the headphone output on
their mp3 players into these little amps to power their headphones.
What is the point of that? Surely you can't improve on the signal
coming out of the headphone socket? I know bugger all about
electronics but it seems that the most this would achieve is literally
just amplify the signal, by which I mean, just make it louder?