I’ve got some good headphones (HD580 precision) and a laptop with spotify I’d like to join the two together with something better than the laptops headphone socket. I’ve got around 100 quid for this and know very little about digital things any suggestions please? I’m thinking I need a usb headphone amp of some sort will that bypass my laptops pretty rubbish built in sounndcard etc etc??

There are such things as “external soundcards.” I couldn’t recommend one over the other though, never used one personally.

I’ve been immensely pleased with the FiiO DAC/amp I use to drive my Grado SR80i’s from either PC, laptop or CD player – I bought the Alpen E-17. Can be used as DAC/Amp or amp alone depending on quality of source; either way the difference with/without it is chalk and cheese.

Thats interesting is it plug and play?

My birthday and Christmas present was a Cambridge Audio Dacmagic XS. It is a combined DAC and headphone amplifier and I use it to drive my HD598 headphones and it sounds great.

Mine came from Amazon and was £99.

As househusband says, i could quite easily bore you absolutely shiteless on this subject for days on end…..or you could just buy yourself a Fiio external usb DAC such as the incredibly decent fiio e-7 or if you are feeling flush and have a notion to throw caution to the wind then the E18 comes rather highly regarded – you can buy them from AMP3, i admit this is a mates company but i have absolutely no affiliation with them but they are decent.

Or i could bore you shiteless regarding Ray Samuels products and other exotica but the above will do you just fine.

I simply haven’t the budget for a high end solution and as the source material is spotify, albeit the best resolution it offers, I’m not sure investing more would be worthwhile. It would be nice to have phono outputs so I can connect to my modest system (Exposure, Audio Physics) but that filo E17 ticks most of the boxes, possibly even the e7 would.