[Gyroscope352]

Hey all,
 
I am looking for something that seems simple, but in practice is turning out much harder to find than I thought.
 
I want a desktop headphone amp with support for speaker passthrough. That is, I want an amp that will send music to my headphones when they're plugged in, but when I unplug them, will automatically send the audio to my (powered) speakers instead. Basically, I don't want to have to turn the speakers on and off every time I switch between them and headphones.
 
The FiiO E9 used to do this, but the new version (FiiO E09K) supposedly does not. I ordered one of the remaining FiiO E9s I could find online, but--and I don't say this often--it's pretty much garbage. The jacks are very poorly made and three months in, one of them has all but broken already. So it looks like this is not going to be a long term solution.
 
I've looked at other popular amps (like the O2, Schitt Magni, etc.) but from what I can tell, none of them seem to have this feature. Either I'm very dumb (totally possible) or most headphone amps are missing what to me seems like a very crucial feature.
 
Anyone have any ideas of something that would do this?

 

[cel4145]

DAC/headphone amp/preamps that do this: Audigoengine D1, Monoprice Desktop headphone amp, Aune T1, Tubemagic D1, and Audio-GD products.

Schiit Asgard 2 and Matrix M-Stage for amp/pre-amps.

However, not certain which of all these will automatically turn the speakers off when headphones are plugged in. I know the Asgard 2 will. You should look for review and appreciation threads on Head-Fi to ask owners about that particular feature.

 

[Gyroscope352]

Of course, it's all the expensive ones. :-/
 
The Monoprice one does look ingriguing--however, it looks so similar to the E9 that I'm wondering if it's going to have the same build quality problems. Also, this comment on Reddit seems to say that it doesn't have the feature I'm looking for--that is, I'll still have to manually turn the speakers off when I plug in my headphones. That's the key component here to me. I might just have to try it out and see.
 
EDIT: Audioengine sells a refurbished version of the D1 for only $135...that might be the ticket for me.