Headphone Jack, thou art mine enemy!

[lost_soul]

I just spent over twenty minutes trying to make my laptop's sound system behave correctly. Some time ago, some random guy decided it would be a good idea to have the toggle between headphones and internal speakers in modern machines controlled via software instead of hardware. As you would guess, this leads to yet more problems. When I connect a pair of headphones, the internal speakers would keep playing. This is obviously undesirable if I'm in a public place. I tried every single audio control but whatever I turned down, it would turn down the headphones too.

 

I'm not an engineer, but I know how these jacks used to work. There was a tiny switch inside the jack that would physically disable the internal speakers on a device when headphones were connected. It used to be plain and simple. After all, why would you want to listen to tiny internal speakers if you've got nice headphones connected?

 

I got it working, but in closing I would like to say this. Do not make things more complex than they need to be. It frequently only causes more problems. This last line applies to the guys who think all sound mixing and routing should be taken care of in software.

[Serpentine]

I deal with fixing things like this all too often, cos I'm one of those handy people. It's amazing how if you explain how badly these 'fancy' systems are designed (post problem, when they kinda care), they're always quite amazed since they can even understand how dumb they are.

 

Just the other day I had an acer craptop here, the wireless only supports WPA1, tho there is no reason for this, both the driver, OS and the hardware support it directly. However Acer for some reason decided to change the INF's to not allow certain things, seeing as it's Broadcom, I'll just go get the driver... no wait you cant, it's not covered by the OEM ID's, so I'll just copy paste it in... ah yeah that works nicely. Next problem, if you dont run the acer network manager AND power manager widget, you don't get wireless or you get it forced to local only. So lets go fix that, no wait the network manager looks for their slightly modified driver to have left some keys in the right place, after editing them into place, it works perfectly... except you don't want that shit running all the time. You can get around it by not having any of their stuff installed and hacking out their modifications to the OEM driver, but it's a complete pain in the ass.

 

Next problem. The sound, it has 3 services each with their own tray icon and control panel, one for the general sound stuff, one for ~effects output~, like even-worse-than-software-EAX1 stuff, a second one for doing that to input... who wants this crap? Really I don't see a demand.But hey, lets eat 90mb of your ramz cos heh, who needs it when you're already allocating vmem and running OS/user processes off of 1gb? (whoa terrible yeah.). So ok, lets remove all of this...

 

Oh snap, the general one controls how the speakers are mapped, since for some or other reason it uses ~virtual audio~ with front and back being inexplicably mapped to left and right on the laptop, eventually realising that it sounded better with just forced stereo and remapping the speakers back to the correct orientation... you're left asking yourself who designs these horrible 'solutions' and who exactly they think buys these terrible little boxes of sadness.

[OrbWeaver]

Maybe not in the case of laptop speakers, but sometimes there is good reason not to rely on the contact-switch inside the jack socket to disable the speakers. My Clavinova (digital piano) has a switch next to the headphone socket which controls whether to always use headphones, always use the speakers, or use headphones only if plugged in. I like this very much, because it means I can leave the headphones plugged in permanently and just flick the switch if I want to start using them instead of the speakers.

 

In more complex or "professional" audio setups, you certainly wouldn't want the automatic behaviour either. For example you might be playing out audio over the main speakers but want to audition some other audio separately on the headphones. Even if the volume controls are implemented in hardware (e.g. on a mixing desk or external sound device), this still requires separate software audio devices to play the different sounds. Again, this probably isn't so important with laptop speakers, but you might well be using the laptop's line output to drive an external sound system (a lot of live-performing electronic musicians do this).