First off, I want to say that I’m not an audio expert, but I could say I’m an enthusiast, so don’t expect anything marvelous from what I’m writing… Initially, I had an old SoundBlaster X-Fi (below average), I used it with the RCA output and a converter to 3.5mm, eventually, I upgraded to a FiiO BTR15 DAC and was surprised that with newer hardware I couldn’t achieve an audio quality level anywhere close to what I had with my SoundBlaster.

Spoiler alert: This journey is crazy, since not everything is as “plug and play” as one would hope, so I decided to see what would happen if I thoroughly checked and finally found some configuration parameters that greatly improved the audio quality.