[Android Software Development] ephexxis:
YES it will make a massive difference. for two reasons. (WARNING LONG POST AHEAD]

firstly, those are studio grade cans you've got there. funny enough, same ones that Dr. Dre uses in his studio. that's right. not beats (shudders in snobby audiophile disgust). while the ATH-M50s and M50Xs have a relatively low impedance rating for their class (if memory serves, less than 50 ohms? around there somewhere), they still have resistance due to the high quality materials they're built with, namely the wiring/shielding. therefor by omitting a proper headphone amplifier, your headphones aren't being driven properly (meaning you aren't pushing the right amount of signal to them). say goodbye to any level of detail intended to be heard by the artist of your recordings.

secondly, the DAC. technically every smart phone has a VERY basic and i mean barebones, gets the job done for minimum raw materials style digital - > analog converter on board. the reason this is important, or rather having a proper DAC is, is because when your music files were created they were recorded raw, in analog form. during the editing and mastering processes they're converted to digital, as these tasks would be much more difficult and limited otherwise, and also because they're going to be compressed to **** so that they can fit on a CD. goes without saying that this process is referred to as "AD" in the sound engineering world and is a nearly universal step in the production process.

when you convert to digital, the noise floor and sound to noise ratio is basically set. it's the job of the mastering engineer to set the gain of the analog recording high enough (but not too high), amongst other noise control techniques, so that the desired "loudness" can be attained when the songs are all normalized without introducing crazy distortion on consumer stereos. too little gain and when played at home, from the digital source, there will be no headroom and it'll be quieter than most other music. too much gain and there will be background noise, too much for any sort of dithering (which technically creates noise of it's own, it just moves low end noise to the higher frequencies outside the human hearing range but indirectly modulates frequencies we can hear) to correct for.

with a proper DAC, we convert the digital data back into analog and restore much of the original recordings crisp, authentic quality. digital recordings carry all sorts of noise and have a trimmed dynamic range (especially when a compressed or "lossy" format like mp3). sending analog audio to your M50s will enable them to much more accurately reproduce the artists intention and often reveal sounds you previously couldn't even hear! you'd be surprised the effect even inaudible noise can have on the space in which the audio resides, effectively muting and removing subtle bits that really enrich a songs overall quality.

a DAC wont turn your mp3s into lossless, but it will ensure you're getting the most detail out of them as is practically possible, and the audible difference is massive.

so given all of this, know that i have personally used several of the lower end amp/DACs available, my first was an ASUS XONAR DG internal PCI (not even PCI-E) soundcard i got at frys for 30 bucks. on ANY speaker or headphone setup, the jump in quality will absolutely stun you the first time you hear it. i was in awe for weeks, myself. the difference between a 30 dollar DAC and a 300 dollar DAC is less than half of the difference between a DAC and no DAC at all, or the crappy one in your phone that just allows digital audio to be a viable media form that you can listen to and does no real restoration.

for anyone needing a portable one I stand by creative's soundblaster E series. for the price, the features you get are kind of ridiculous. the e5 outputs in true 24bit 192k hi fidelity. meaning if you have lossless recordings you can hear them as they were sitting on the mastering engineers hard drive. OVER BLUETOOTH if you want. literally wireless output of studio quality audio with no degradation. that **** is so ca$h.

tl;dr shell out 35-90 bucks and move from peasanthood to the master race. you can thank me at the bottom of this entirely too long post. :cool: