Front Headphone Jack

GavinO

GavinO

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Joined
Jan 4, 2004
Messages
905
Location
Ledyard, CT USA
Of late, I've been looking for a way to use headphones with my desktop machine without crawling behind my desk to plug them in (I also enjoy having speakers when people aren't trying to sleep). I thought that it would be a simple matter of connecting a 1/8" stereo jack to an internal output of my sound card (Sound Blaster Live 5.1), but among the varied internal connectors (including even one to output to a modem!), there is no headphone/speaker output. I would really like to not have a passthrough in back (I think they look terrible), so if anyone has ideas on how I might get the sound signal from a point inside my machine, I'd love to hear about it.
 
On the board isn't there an extra jumper to hook up another jack? I think my son put some kind of an adapter that takes up a drive bay that has speaker and headphone jacks. Might want to look into something like that. I know my case has jacks on the front and they are connected to the sound card with the same type cable that connects the cdrom.
 
I managed to find a pinout table for the various headers on the card (http://www.driverheaven.net/showthread.php?s=&threadid=48786), but alas, there are no analog connections. So, I figured that it can't possibly be that hard to convert one of the S/PDIF outputs to an analog signal (the breakout box does that as one of its lesser functions). I found this project to build a converter (http://sound.westhost.com/project85.htm), the only problem being that the S/PDIF decoder chip costs about as much as the nice version of the breakout box on eBay (cost being the entire reason I want to DIY). Does anyone know of cheap S/PDIF to analog converters? They must exist somewhere ... S/PDIF is a rather old digital audio standard.

I think this has to be the craziest price scale I've ever seen:

$30 - breakout box with S/PDIF->Analog out, Analog in-> S/PDIF, and optical in/out
$35 - IC that converted S/PDIF signal to something that another $30 chip can convert to analog
$150 - A box with that does S/PDIF->Analog out

Seem inverted to anyone else?
 
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