Dell Laptop With 2 Headphone Outs - Question

Hi friends

I have dell xps 15 laptop with 2 headphone outs and 1 mic out. I am wondering is these 2 headphone outs have different capability. My require is that I want to connect my speakers to 1 slot, the speakers are always on. When I want to do some private listening, I plus in my headphones into the 2nd slot. At this time, the sound comes out of both speakers & headphones. I want the speakers to go silent and the sound to come out only from headphones. And when I remove the headphones, the sound should shift back to the speakers. I dont want to turn off my speakers eevery time i plug in headphones for private listening. Any clue how to do this?

Thanks.

 

Can you plug your headphones into your speakers? If you can't (which should turn off the speakers outputs), then you'll have to unplug the speakers from your xps.

 

My older laptop had 1 headphone jack and line out for powered speakers and if properly connected, it would work exactly as you want, if you don't have separate line out (can you reassign 2nd headphone to line out? ) I'm afraid no easy fix.

 

I used to own a Dell XPS 13 that had two audio output jacks (and 1 mic in). Those audio jacks can be configured to be used in multiple different configurations:
Configuration 1: Two identical stereo output jacks, plus one mic input jack.
Configuration 2: 5.1 speaker surround sound output jack (the mic doubles as a mic-in or center-channel out jack, dependign on how you configure your sound card through software)

So yes, you definitely can connect both speakers + headphones to your laptop, and tell Windows to only play sound out of one of those (speakers or headphones). You do this by going to Windows Control Panel --> Sound and setting the correct audio output device as Default Device. Switch one of those to default to play through speakers, set to the other one to play through headphones.

And once you figure that out, and get tired of going to Windows Control Panel --> Sound to do the switching every time, you can start using a Windows gadget called DefaultSound to make it easier on yourself ( http://defaultsound.tofran.com/). If you are running Windows 8, and want the Gadgets functionality from Windows 7, you can run a program called 8GadgetPack to add gadgets to Windows 8 ( http://8gadgetpack.net/)

 

Is it possible to use these connectors for different purposes, e.g. line-out for master output and headphone for monitor output in Traktor and similar DJ software?

 

Technically yes, you can have two of the ports do output.

But they will not be line-level outputs. They are just output ports on an internal 5.1 sound card, and not multi-purpose ports on a studio-quality sound card.

If you want to do the kind of stuff you're talking about, Starlight5, you're better off with an external sound card that has both better components and output options.

 

kent1146, I'm currently doing away with second, extremely cheap, USB soundcard for monitor output, and fancy ASIO config to glue it together. No problems with latency for what I do. Still have an old Acer with two audio output ports, though. Didn't manage to make it work with ASIO at all back in the day, but if it's possible I'd give it another try - for experiment's sake.