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.
No issue actually. You could simply do that and test whether the sound is good enough or not.
If you’re looking for an upgrade, a DAC (without amp is ok since you’re gonna connect it to your home amp) should serve you well and typically should sound much better than direct analog connection.
Headphone amplifier should be the last resort. Stereo amplifier might not be very effective at powering headphone, but power wise, they should be plenty enough
What would that improve? Builtin DACs already do a great job unless you are going to sample/process the output again in a studio environment.