Made a bit of a blunder in buying a new headset today...

Well, I decided it was time to get a new headset today. My old one's in-line volume control was having serious issues and today was the last straw with it. It was a Plantronics DSP-500, one I bought probably 4-5 years ago if I remember correctly.

I liked that headset, so I figured I'd go with another Plantronics headset and settled on the .Audio 770. I compared the features between it and the DSP-750, and the only difference was that the 750 had a DSP (whatever that was!) and the 770 was apparently capable of emulating surround sound.

After connecting the new headset via USB, I was very impressed with the sound quality and listened to music all afternoon. Around 8- or 9PM I tried playing Crysis. For some reason unknown to me at the time, the sound was incredibly choppy. My old headset never did that. I played through the level trying to figure out why it sounded like this. Then I realized my mistake: DSP stands for Digital Signal Processor. i.e., My old one handled the sound as opposed to now where my processor was doing all the work, hence the choppy performance.

I tried connecting it to my sound card (this headset is natively a dual 3.5mm jack, one for the microphone and the other for the headphones), but it didn't work. After reading around I found out that apparently my sound card cannot produce analog sound, therefore my headset's only good for playing music with Winamp or other processor-light activities.

What I really want to know is this: if I were to take this headset back (that's a big if - the packaging it comes in isn't conducive to returns, it's that hardened plastic garbage that's ridiculously hard to open without mangling the packaging) and get the DSP-750, would my sound quality be noticeably reduced? If I'm not able to return the headset, what sort of sound card am I looking at that is capable of using an analog headset? Does it matter if the sound card has built-in RAM (Creative Labs X-Fi Gamer vs. X-Fi "Fatality" Professional Series)? And am I looking for one with a Digital-to-Analog conversion such as they both have, or something entirely different?