[PLUG] [Somewhat OT] PC audio cabling

[Bill Jonas <bill@billjonas.com>]

Apologies if some find this off-topic.  It's more of a hardware question.

We all know what happens when you plug a set of headphones into a portable
stereo.  The speakers shut off and the sound is output solely through the
headphones.  (And some television sets do this, too.)

My question is this: Is it possible to do this somehow with a PC, as well?
I had (still have, actually) a large set of speakers with a headphone jack
on the front that would accomplish the same function as the headphone jack
on a stereo.  I upgraded those speakers to a nice set from Cambridge
Soundworks (many thanks to N-Tropy for pointing them out to me) because the
old ones were starting to cut out a bit, and crackle when I adjusted the
volume.  The new ones don't have that nice headphone jack on the front.  Is
there any sort of connector available to, say, sit between the speaker jack
and the soundcard jack, providing an extra jack for headphones, which will
automatically cut the sound over to the headphone jack when something gets
plugged into it, while still providing normal speaker output otherwise?
(Sorry for the bad phrasing.  That question should be taken out back and
shot.)  Basically, I want to find a way to make the sound system on my
peecee behave like a thirty-dollar portable stereo, without having to crawl
around to the back of the system and switch plugs.  My CD drive has a
headphone jack, but it's only good if I'm playing a regular audio CD.

Again, apologies for being somewhat off-topic.  I would've done a search,
but I haven't the foggiest about what kind of search terms I should use.

-- 
Bill Jonas                | "If you haven't gotten where you're going,
bill@billjonas.com        |  you aren't there yet." --George Carlin
http://www.billjonas.com/ |  http://www.harrybrowne.org/


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