I would never call myself an audiophile, but I know what I like. I told Santa that I wanted a set of the cheap HE-X4 planar headphones for Christmas. I plan to use them for music from my desktop PC. I understand that if my audio card/chip can’t deliver enough power to drive the headphones to a sufficient volume level, I’ll need an amp between the PC and the cans. But being an old “stereo” guy, is there any reason I couldn’t input the PC audio into a home audio receiver/amp and use the headphone output from that to drive the headphones? What advantage, if any, would I get from buying one of these fancy DAC headphone amps? What advantage do more expensive headphone amps have over cheaper headphone amps? At 66 years old, I have no hope of having “golden ears” any longer.
Someone else mentioned the poor quality of the headphone jack in receivers, but I want to mention it’s possible to connect your headphones directly to the speaker ports with the 4 pin speaker connectors to 4 pin XLR to your headphones because you have low sensitivity planars. Granted you need to make sure your receiver has low enough power output to not blow the drivers at your headphones’ impedance. I did this with my old HE-500 and the Emotiva miniX a-100 receiver, which you can see someone mentioned in detail how to do here:
https://www.head-fi.org/threads/diy-emotiva-mini-x-a-100-headphone-amp-mod-guide.705196/