My sound card died a while ago and I have been using onboard sound instead and it is noticeably worse. For example it distorts during the loud bits of Dark Knight Rises and games just don't sound as good as they used to. I will be using a pair of Sennheiser HD280s so 15.1 surround sound isn't too important of a feature. My last sound card had some headphone specific post-processing effects (like Dolby Headphone) and I quite liked the improvement it made. I am looking to spend around $60ish. What do you guys recommend?

i ended up getting an external creative soundblaster 5.1 thingo connects via USB. Mainly so i can transfer between lappy and desktop. it rocks.

http://www.techbuy.com.au/p/164846/Creative/70SB109500001/details.asp

Look at the Asus Xonar range. They are tops. I'm not sure if they have a ~$60 card though.

I'd recommend avoiding the creative range if you're running Windows 8, because they still don't have official drivers for most of the cards yet, and the beta ones are shit and buggy as all fuck.

I'd recommend avoiding the creative range if you're running Windows 8, because they still don't have official drivers for most of the cards yet, and the beta ones are shit and buggy as all fuck.

Seconded, Creative have really let themselves go recently. Their Sound Blaster Z range looks somewhat like a return to form, but their drivers for Windows Vista onwards have been an absolute pain. And their lack of proper Windows 8 support so far for their last good range of cards (SB X-Fi PCI-E) has been really frustrating.

...Creative have really let themselves go recently. ...
...their drivers for Windows Vista onwards have been an absolute pain...

I'm not sure where your definition of 'recent' comes from, but this is where Creative have existed for a number of years now.

The bit that REALLY bugs me about it is that throughout WinXP's early years, there was an epic soundcard battle, and creative edged out all of the [decent] competition, only to get to Windows Vista and claim (as MS had 'officially dropped support for the game port) 'We won't be writing drivers for any of our soundcard range that have game ports within the design spec' (effectively ruling all of their 'Sound Blaster Live' and 'Audigy' range obsolete).

They did eventually release beta drivers 4-5 months after Vista's launch, but not before being thrashed by the general gaming community.

I was pissed off enough that the 'Audigy' cards were the killing blow to products like Diamond's 'Monster Sound' range of cards (I recall the mx200 as having it's own sound processor on it!!) It was around this time that I switched back to the onboard chipsets for my audio. It's not as good as I recall having a sound setup, but be fucked if I'm going to give a dollar to Creative, or anyone who's licenced any of their products (which is sad now that I think about it. I started out with a 'Sound Blaster' and the first optical drive I ever used was a creative too!).

Ended up getting this one - http://www.asus.com/Multimedia/Audio_Cards/Xonar_DGX/

Pretty much perfectly suited to my needs.

I'm a talking parrot.
Please talk to me.

The card I bought apparently has a headphone amp.

Built-in Headphone AMP to power up every sound detail in gaming
3 headphone AMP gain modes for different usage scenarios - VOIP, pro-gaming, exciter

Doubt it is as good as the one recommended earlier by bepatient, but I am no audiophile and it sounds good to me. Certainly better than the onboard sound which was really pathetic.

Major lack of driver support aside, Creative are total fuckwits that deserve to die off:

In 2005, Creative was losing what was once a death grip on the PC audio market. Intel had released the ‘Azalia’ specification for audio, now known as Intel HD Audio. This massive leap in integrated audio rendered discrete cards all but obsolete, so Creative needed to do whatever it could to promote EAX as the premium audio solution for gamers.

In aggressively pushing EAX, it inadvertently destroyed the remaining goodwill of gamers, already annoyed by the lack of easy access to drivers, and for those with longer memories, the death of the only serious competitor in the market, Aureal. Through a notorious act of patent-enforcing bastardry, it forced id Software to include EAX support in Doom 3, despite the fact that John Carmack already had a perfectly good software audio solution.

The patent in question involves techniques for the ‘z-fail’ method of computing shadow volumes in 3D graphics engines. This is a technique widely known as ‘Carmack’s Reverse’, named after John Carmack, who used the technique in Doom 3 to cope with the sheer amount of shadows going on in the game. Unfortunately, despite this widely accepted nickname, Creative held a patent from 1999 that described a similar technique.

So, id announced that it would be incorporating support for EAX in Doom 3, and Creative graciously allowed them to use the Carmack Reverse without paying for it

( Source )