I use headphones between a third and half the time I’m at my computer. It’s mildly complicated/PITA to switch out. Among workarounds, I’d like to put in a Y-splitter at the sound card and run both headphones and speakers at the same time. If I want to use the headphones only, I’ll just turn the sound down on the speakers themselves. Is this likely to degrade overall sound quality?
It depends - the Y-cable puts the headphones and the speakers in parallel, so the load on the source doubles. It should be fine, though, if the levels aren’t too loud and the sound card isn’t working on the edge of its specifications. I’ve used two headphones on one iPod before (surely that’s gotta have less output than a sound card) with no ill effects.
Thanks. Didn’t think about it that way–I’ve shared headphones with Mrs. Devil on an MP3 player.
Come to think of it, to minimize the clutter I’ll probably only have the speakers and an extension for the headphones, so they won’t be always-on. Dumb OP is dumb. Oh well.
Thanks~
In theory, every connection adds noise. In practice, I doubt with most sound cards, speakers, and headphones that you’d ever notice it.
Two other things that can affect quality are the lengths of the signal cables and the impedance difference between the earphones and speakers.
I doubt either will make much of a difference in this particular case.
If you intend using the headphone output socket to drive both speakers and headphones, and have both in circuit via a Y adaptor there will potentially be some degradation of the speaker sound. In a perfect world the output of the sound card would be a pure voltage source - which means zero output impedance. In reality it won’t be so. Indeed there is a common practice of inserting about 100 ohms of resistance on headphone outputs, and typically line level outputs are similar. This means that the presence of the headphones will affect the signal seen by the speakers. Two things are likely. The impedance of the headphones is neither infinite nor purely real, so you will likely see some change in frequency response when the headphones are present. Also, the headphones will pick up ambient sound, and act like a microphone, and that will make its way to the signal. Not much will get in, but in principle some will.
All that said, the general quality of computer speakers is such that it probably won’t actually make any appreciable difference to the sound. Most such speakers are both so low quality, and located in such poor positions that the changes seen to the response will be less than the intrinsic issues they come with.
Agree with above – you won’t notice it, most likely.
But do not use a split cable to try to “mix” sound – I’ve blown a few (albeit cheap) guitar pedals by going the other way around. It’s bad, m’kay? Yeah, you should be fine. Just don’t mix two signals together using a “Y-Splitter,” to get into one amplification source, or you can really hurt your equipment. Just spend the 50 bucks or so for a cheap mixer or grab a friend who can solder a resistor in if you really want to do that. Otherwise, just have fun and don’t worry about it too much unless the sound really bothers you. You’ll probably have more noise using a cheap mixer than just a straight split cable, so I’d say it’s a wash.