Headsets don't exactly suck, they just offer poor value because you tend to pay premium for the integrated microphone and the gaming branding. Price for price, headphones and a cheap mic will either give you better sound quality, or net you the same sound quality for cheaper.
Also, seperate microphones can be a real inconvenience if you tape them to your headphones, or can pick up unwanted ambient sound if they are stationary (I for example use a MX Blue keyboard and most affordable stationary mics would pick up the clicketyclack nonstop). So you also pay extra for simple convenience if you don't want to tinker with duct tape or get ensnared in the additional cable (I manage to do that with just one cable already ...).

However lately headphone manufacturers start dipping their toes in the gaming market, Audio Technica for example offers the ATH-P(D)G1 / A(D)G1, which are basically ATH-A(D)900X cans with a microphone built into them (a surprisingly good microphone if reviews are to be believed, considering the headset and the headphones have the same price). Though at ~260€ that isn't exactly budget range for the average gamer.

Sennheiser headsets are much cheaper and whilst not of the same sound quality as their dedicated headphones for the same price range, Sennheiser makes great cans and it does show in sound quality in their gaming headsets too, even though you still pay some premium for the AIO package.

Please remember me if you ever replace your headphones and don't know what to do with the old ones (provided they still work).

I wasn't exactly cheap when I got my headset (Astro A40s) and they are pretty decent but even that is only ~140€.

If you want better sound, the first thing to look at are better spealers/headphones. Onboard soundchips are good enough to drive most cans with solid audio quality. The next step up would be a better DAC, though here the pricing range pretty much goes from ~100 bucks to infinity, so you have to strike a balance between sound processing and sound reproduction so you don't end up wasting your hardware's potential through bottlenecking one side with suboptimal performance from the other.

With diminishing returns of course.

I'm pretty certain it's impossible for even trained human ears to discern any difference from a 10k audio setup compared with this 50k one. At this level of technological sophistication it's much like extreme overclocking, you break benchmark records but the threshold of practicality has long since been crossed.

I mean, what kind of audio format do you feed those machines? I could bet they come with an automated self-destruct mechanism that initiates if you try to feed it something like lossy 320kbps MP3 files. Or at least it should.

What's the audiophile container standard (if there even is one)? Do lossless containers like FLAC and ogg do the trick, or does it need to be stuff like vinyl or the elusive Super Audio?

But the difference between lossy and lossless audio files is noticeable, ever so slightly. Or maybe I'm just being hit hard with confirmation bias, but I can't go back to MP3, it sounds just a tad choppy compared to the FLACs I've grown accustomed to and HDD space is present aplenty so I'll take double/triple the file size. Besides I don't listen to that much music that I'd risk clotting my single 1TB drive with it. Games and anime take up the vast majority of that drive. my entire music folder takes up just shy of 21GBs and that's already too many albums for me to care to count.

And yeah Orpheus is a technology showpiece, though I find it slightly puzzling as to why they didn't limit production numbers like they did with the previous one, make it a true collector's item. I mean with that pricetag they aren't going to sell much of them anyway, so might aswell give any collectors still sitting on the fence the real exclusivity deal they might be looking for.

You know Celldweller?