I used to be a Sony PHA-1 owner. For the longest time I ran it with my laptop as an external sound card, which nicely dodged all the noise coming out of the laptop’s built-in audio. Honestly, it worked fine. Then a few days ago some little bottom I used to gank over and over back in my World of Warcraft days — opposite faction, same server — forced me to sell him my PHA-1. So I had to buy a new one. I considered the Creative E5 first, but word is it’s crap. I also considered the PHA-3, until I found out it needs its own power supply, and my laptop doesn’t have that many USB ports. So the PHA-2 it was. It arrived, and sure enough: praise be to Sony.