Speakers and Headphones through same slot.

cocoshovel

Hi. Im unhappy with the sound quality of my front panel connector and wanted to route my headphones and speakers through the rear panel sound slot (motherboard sound).
I want to do this without having to get up and remove/replace the cables each time. Essentially having sound playing through both my speakers and headphones at the same time.

I bought a Y splitter cable for this but uppon arrival I noticed that one side is an INput for microphones while the other is the OUTput for headphones, making it useless for my needs.
Is there any way to achieve this using just the rear mobo sound slot or is it a case of having to buy a soundcard, which I was hoping to avoid.
Maybe Im doing something wrong and it is possible to have both devices playing through the Y cable even if one is a mic slot?

Any help would be appreciated.

Overheal

https://www.google.com/search?q=usb+soundcard&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a#q=usb+soundcard&hl=en&safe=off&client=firefox-a&hs=6v7&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&prmd=imvns&source=univ&tbm=shop&tbo=u&sa=X&ei=FTipT9eQDofo9AT27tXQAg&ved=0CMEBEK0E&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.r_qf.,cf.osb&fp=fb4a907bedc68f87&biw=1920&bih=944

cocoshovel

Overheal wrote: »

https://www.google.com/search?q=usb+soundcard&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a#q=usb+soundcard&hl=en&safe=off&client=firefox-a&hs=6v7&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&prmd=imvns&source=univ&tbm=shop&tbo=u&sa=X&ei=FTipT9eQDofo9AT27tXQAg&ved=0CMEBEK0E&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.r_qf.,cf.osb&fp=fb4a907bedc68f87&biw=1920&bih=944

Ok. A lot of these just seem to be the same thing as the Y splitter with one speaker slot and a mic slot. The ones with more slots just seem to give very vague explanations or none at all.

also even when I plug headphones into front panel it mutes the speakers, how would I overcome this?

Overheal

Windows 7 and Vista can handle something like this but its usually application specific. Which program do you want on the speakers and which do you want on the headphones? For instance, I can program WoW to run through my speakers, in the WoW settings, and I can tell Ventrilo (and 7) to route it and all other sounds through my headset. It works best in programs that allow you to set their audio defaults. For all other programs, they switch to your active-default audio device.

This trick is you need a second sound Device, like I linked to. These USB soundcards are recognized by the PC as their own entity, seperate from, for instance, the Realtek Audio found in most PCs and is also seperate from the audio over HDMI component.

AlmightyCushion

A headphone splitter cable should do this.

Nothingbetter2d

buy a usb headset and leave your speakers plugged in the back