[gmreplay]

I've got a Xonar DX sound card in my tower. I generally plug my speakers into the sound card, and then plug my headphones into a port on the speakers. Alternately, I can plug the headphones into the front port of my PC tower. I almost never directly plug the headphones straight into the sound card.
 
My question is whether I'm losing a substantial amount of audio quality by putting either the speakers or PC tower in between my headphones and sound card. 

 

[ProtegeManiac]

Quote:

Originally Posted by gmreplay /img/forum/go_quote.gif

I've got a Xonar DX sound card in my tower. I generally plug my speakers into the sound card, and then plug my headphones into a port on the speakers. Alternately, I can plug the headphones into the front port of my PC tower. I almost never directly plug the headphones straight into the sound card.

 

My question is whether I'm losing a substantial amount of audio quality by putting either the speakers or PC tower in between my headphones and sound card. 

 

If you plug into the speakers, then the circuit in the speakers will be what matters. The problem there is that in terms of amplification the ones built into speakers very generally suck, although the more likely issue you will have is if it's a surround speaker system receiving a surround signal. If the speaker's circuit can't mere and downmix the surround signal into stereo for the headphone, then if you're playing games, you're only going to hear Front Left and Front Right on the headphone.

 

If you plug into the audio ports on the computer case, you have to check where the ports are hooked up to. If they're hooked up to the mobo, then they definitely aren't using the soundard and the mobo just defaults to that when a headphone is detected. Some soundcards though have a port for plugging in the front jacks, while some have the mic input on the rear and none to hook up the front audio ports. If you have a red mobo AFAIK even if they have mic input in the rear they usually rout the signal of their good headphone amplifier chips to drive the headphones through the case audio jacks.

 

[gmreplay]

Really good info, thank you. So if I am able to plug my case directly into my soundcard, will that produce sound equal to if I plugged into the soundcard directly, or am I going to lose quality because of the cheap quality cables built into the case? I assume there might be some interference or loss of quality as a result, but I'm not sure. 

 

[ProtegeManiac]

Quote:

Originally Posted by gmreplay /img/forum/go_quote.gif

Really good info, thank you. So if I am able to plug my case directly into my soundcard, will that produce sound equal to if I plugged into the soundcard directly, or am I going to lose quality because of the cheap quality cables built into the case? I assume there might be some interference or loss of quality as a result, but I'm not sure. 

 

If the case audio jacks can be connected to the soundcard then you get the same quality as the soundcard. I wouldn't worry too much about the cable being cheap, as long as there's no noise going through (and wiring is correct) then there's really no need to go through the trouble of replacing that unless you know how to do the cabling using better cables with better shielding. Alternately you can ask Custom Cables and CableMod if they can do one for the audio jacks, although what they usually do are modular cables that run from the PSU to every other component.