[mojo]

A customer brought an ASUS Xonar soundcard in and I thought that the LED lit audio jacks looked nice:



I looks much better in real life, especially with a bit less ambient light.

I searched but couldn't find any examples of people doing this themselves. Unfortunately I can't open the card up to see inside it, but I have a feeling they are probably using off-the-shelf lit sockets. I'm sure there must be a way to reproduce it

 

[vixr]

thats cool...thanks for the pic...

 

[iriverdude]

Bit of a gimmick no?

 

[sandbasser]

That really is pretty cool. It would make it easier to figure out which connector to use for phones/mic/aux/etc - e.g plug the speakers into the connector with the 'red' light'... etc pretty clever. IMHO

 

[rds]

The Xonar DX also has this feature and the jacks look like this:

 

[mojo]

I think it just looks nice. The key is going to be finding a suitable socket to work with.

 

[Emooze]

The locking neutrik jack has a clear whole all the way through, wouldn't be hard to hot glue an led right in the back. I'm thinking a dim red LED would look very nice.

 

[Punnisher]

It looks nice but when are you ever going to see it except for when plugging/unplugging? Maybe more if you are able to walk around the back of your computer.

 

[mojo]

Sure, it's a gimmick. ASUS did a motherboard with LED lighting "so you can work on it in the dark"...

Aside from colour coding I think you could do something nice with the plastic around the socket. Usually it's black but you could either use transparent plastic or just make a ring of plexiglass or whatever around it. With a switched socket it could even light up or change colour when something is plugged in.

Like lit volume knobs, it's pointless but adds something special to the look of the device.

RDS: Looks like those jacks have the LED integrated. Could be tricky to reproduce.

 

[Juaquin]

The switchcraft 3.5mm jacks with the clear plastic top would probably work well with an led lighting it from above. Not quite the same effect but still pretty cool. The Nuetrik 1/4" jack (like that used in the SSMH) is pretty open on top - you could shine some light down into it between the contacts.

 

[rds]

I did this kind of effect before with a switchcraft 1/4" jack and like people mentioned here it's not much of an effect since you don't see anything when your phones are plugged in. On top of that most high end amps should not have phones plugged into them after they're turned on, so you're not going to see the LED unless you turn on the amp just to see it.