Speakers/Headphones

If you haven't purchased yet, you might consider getting the SB Platinum instead of the X-gamer. It's quite a bit more money, but one of the many additional features is a headphone jack on the "Live Drive" (which installs in a 5 1/4 external drive bay). Inserting the headphone jack disables the rear speaker outputs automatically. My older Platinum requires a 1/4" to 1/8" adapter to use lightweight headphones.

A much cheaper way would be to get a 1/8" minijack "headphone" extension cable from Radioschlock and route that to an accessible location. (Make sure you get one that has one male and one female end, not two male ends.) You could then switch between your headphones and the speaker connector as you needed. Kind of crude, but effective.

I'm sure there's a way you could make up an external switching jack that would automatically disable the speakers when the headphones were plugged in. Again, I think Radioschlock has minijacks that would do this but it would take a bit of soldering, etc. Maybe they even have a pre-made box that would do this.

BW

the more I learn, the less I'm sure I know...

I use a headphone jack splitter at the soundcard to give me two outputs of the front channel. One goes to my speakers, the other to a headphone extension cable. When I want to use the headphones, I just turn off the speakers, and plug my headphones into the extension. Works like a charm!

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I have not yet begun to procrastinate.