At lan parties, I like to bring headphones, not my whole speaker system. The problem is, I only have a speaker-out on my sound card, so when I plug the headphones in directly, I have to turn the volume WAYYY down. Unfortunately, there have been a few instances where the volume has been turned up for one reason or another and my ears get pounded. Is there any kind of adaptor I can plug in between the speaker-out and the headphones to cut the volume way down? thanks!
you can use a clipper which stops excess voltage across the 'phones. Anything above the clipping region is distorted so it'll sound crap until you turn it down. Good article here. That said, Bursars suggestion of inline volume control headphones is prolly easier unless your attached to your 'phones regards g
Just get two potentiometers, a male 1/8", and a female 1/8", some wire, and a little solder. Since you're wanting to do volume control, I would suggest getting a logarithmic pot (opposed to a linear one). However, if you merely want to reduce the power and nothing else, then a linear pot will work. NOTE: you need one pot per channel and since I assume you're going to want stereo....you need two. If you want to set a fixed volume reduction, you can just use a simple resistor in series with each channel. However, you'll need to find the resistance first which vary depending on: the output power of your sound card, the impedence of your head phones, and exactly how much reduction you want. So I can't tell you want to buy. Play and see.
a reasonably priced pot would introduce a lot of noise into the signal though. If you want to do that though, you can get pots that have two channels on a single dial so L/R are in balance. If you want to spend serious cash, get an ALPS one... they're about £9 for the 20K version g
pots are fairly expensive things... a decent one costs about £4... any price before that prolly uses a carbon track that is a bit dodgy for transferring high quality signal across it. They're fine for just altering a fairly constant voltage you never need to hear, but for an audio signal you hear, they introduce hiss and crackle into the signal. If you go this way, get plastic track and dual gang, not really important if its linear or log scale... regards g
