Re: [MLUG - DISCUSSION] connecting a computer to a sound system

[EMAIL:PROTECTED (Rich Tollerton)]

On Sun, Jul 07, 2002 at 11:09:47PM -0500, Spurling, Shannon wrote:
> Make sure you plug into the line out, and not the headphone out. You
> won't break any thing, unless it's not properly protected from being
> over driven, but it sure could sound crappy. :-) This one is pretty
> much a no brainer, but hooking headphones to a desktop can be a
> challenge. A lot of sound cards only have line out, and can't decently
> drive a pair of headphones. And then there's the whole reaching around
> to switch between the speakers and the headphones if it can drive
> them. That is a problem to try and get around. I fought with it for
> several months, and finaly bought a new sound card when nothing else
> worked.

It's surprising you've had so many problems - every sound card I've
seen, from an ensoniq soundscape to sblive to aureal to superquad to
the audigy, doesn't go into mad hysterics when you hook headphones up.
Even the ac97 ports on a recent Athlon motherboard I've used had plenty
of juice to drive headphones. (the noise isolation was another story)

In fact, I recently built a headphone amp worth $100 in parts to hook
up between my sblive and my Sennheiser HD570s, and to be honest I have
a hard time noticing a difference. I'll need to build an ABX comparator 
just to see if my amp's any good!

I believe the distinction between line-out and headphone-out was back
when headphone drivers had _terrible_ audio quality and quality op amps
had no drive capability, but nowadays you can get an OPA634 for $2 and
just forget worrying about audio quality.

> Shannon

-- 
Rich Tollerton <EMAIL:PROTECTED>

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