Rear panel headphone sockets

The Situation

In my Home Office I like to work to the sound of background music, so I'll crank up some Progressive house trance from DI.FM.   Usually I just use my 2.1 (speakers and subwoofer) combo but sometimes I need to use my headphones, as I either need to be quiet due to my son sleeping in the room behind me or just so I can block out the sounds of all three of my boys going apeshit outside the study door.

You'd think this was an easy task to do, right?  Not so fast, young Padawan!  The roadblocks I hit on the path to glory were numerous and stupid.

Headphone sockets

If your PC has both speakers and headphones, how do you reliably switch between them?  Well as far as all the hardware manufacturers are concerned, you use "jack detection" which detects when a pair of headphones are plugged into the headphone socket on the front of your PC, and switches the audio output device accordingly.  This means you have to continually keep plugging in and removing my headphones every time you want to use them, which is highly annoying and over a long period of time will just result in worn out connectors and broken cables.

AC97 and HD audio front panels

So the manufacturers of sound devices say "just use jack detection".  That's great if you like to keep yanking cables all the time, but as it turns out hardly any cheaper PC cases have HD audio front panels and instead follow the "AC97" standard.  Jack detection is only possible on HD audio compliant panels, so if you don't have one of these panels you can't use jack detection and you will need to manually switch your audio output from the speakers to the headphones.  

OK, that seems easy enough, right?  Nope.

Windows 7 audio device switching (or lack of it)

As it turns out, Windows 7 does not have the ability to easily switch between audio outputs.  The only way to do it out of the box is to open the "Playback Devices" icon in the System Tray, then when the list of devices pops up, right click the audio output device you want to use and then selecting "Set as Default Device".

Ugly, right?

Anyway, once you've done the manual device change, you'll need to repeat the process in order to switch your audio devices back.   Sigh.

There is light at the end of the tunnel though, with tools such as SoundSwitch that let you assign a HotKey to do all of the above for you.  I can't recommend this tool enough.

Benefits - VoIP/video call software

The other benefit of having multiple audio output (and input) devices active at any one time is that you can dedicate one of them to your video call/VoIP software.  Skype and 3CXPhone in particular use statically assigned audio devices and there is no hot switching of devices within the application (like, say, a "speakerphone" option to switch between your headset and your speakers).   I personally like to make all my VoIP calls via my headset as it means I can sit through a 2-hour teleconference without using my arms.   Trust me when I say that once you have a long teleconference with speakers on both ears rather than one, you will never want to go back to your stupid one-ear headset ever again.

But wait...

So, we're almost there, right?  Well, that depends on whether you like to have your headphone cables sticking out the front/top of your PC all the freaking time.  Since my headphones are always plugged in, my kids are always bumping into them and damaging the wires and plugs.  It's a nightmare for any parent!

And so this leads us into our last major gripe.

Rear panel headphone ports don't exist??

Your swanky expensive motherboard came with what looks like a dozen audio sockets on the back of it, but once you plug your speakers into one (or more) of them, the only way to get your headphones connected is to plug them into a "front panel".   But wait, all I want to do is have both my speakers and my headphones connected to a socket on the rear of the PC!  

Turns out nobody supports this.  Headphones are for the front of the PC, dontchaknow?  GRRR!  Stupid tech companies!  Just let me re-map my freakin audio ports how I want!

Nobody even makes a rear panel connector that acts as a front panel.  I mean, REALLY?  How hard can it be?  I was thinking of knocking one together myself from spare parts, but there are other more elegant solutions.

Secondary sound cards

Whilst Windows 7 doesn't like letting you switch audio outputs, it does however fundamentally support multiple outputs.  So, why not just buy a dedicated soundcard for your headphones?  Indeed, this is really the easiest solution and there are many players here.   Some headphones even come with a USB soundcard, which basically lets you add a dedicated headphone-only audio output device via a USB dongle.  

As for me, I've got enough bloody USB devices hanging off the back of my PC so I decided to step it up a little, and buy an Asus Xonar DG PCI soundcard.  This is a fully featured soundcard but the software drivers and core functionality of this card scream "use me for your headphones".  It supports hardware-assisted Dolby Headphone technology and includes an onboard amplifier specifically designed to boost the volume to your headphones based on the impedance rating of the speakers contained within them.   It's a nice touch and I have to say the sound quality of this card is superb.  It cost me a total of $45 (Australian); a good deal.

I now have my speakers connected to the onboard Realtek soundcard, and my headphones (and headphone microphone) connected to the Xonar DG.  Works a treat, but note that this is a PCI card and you may find it jammed up against your expensive (and hot) PCI-express video card.  Luckily it's a half-height card so the problem is somewhat helped by that.

One last thing

Before signing off with a happy smile on my face, I did discover one last piece of obscurity in the Asus Xonar DG.  This soundcard supports the use of a front panel connector (like any other soundcard), but  unless you specify the front panel type as being "HD Audio" (rather than AC97) it will always default to the front panel as it assumes headphones are connected there.   If you don't do this, every time your PC reboots or comes back from sleep mode, your headphones don't work because the Xonar DG defaults its audio output to the front panel!  This can be changed via the Xonar control panel software, but that's no better than having to manually switch audio output devices via the system tray.

Be warned that you can only switch the "front panel" mode on the Xonar DG  during the installation of the driver.  Stupid!