Guide Headphone splitter out of old soundcard

My goal for this project was to create a headphone splitter for my speaker systems... this wouldn't be any normal headphone splitter though, it would split 1 port into 5 (vs the normal 2)... I'm also almost flat broke right now, so with great ambition and a bunch of free time on my hands I set to work.



step 1: board mounted headphone jacks are taken off of an old soundcard. I heated up the board with the heatgun you see in the background and they fell right off... sorry sound card, but you won't work in my computer anyways (all of my pci don't work).



Step 2: Using my mp3 player and headphones, I analyzed the jacks and found out which pins were for the ground, left and right wires. A diagram was drawn of the plugs and a plan of attack for the circut board was drawn. I needed to drill the holes larger to accomodate the size of the pins on the headphone jacks. I also started to bend off the unneeded pins, as you can see on the pink one.



Step 3: The jacks are soldered onto the board. Using 15 strips of wire, all ghetto stripped with a kitchen knife the jacks are wired up in parallel.



Step 4: The board is all finished and ready to be tested. All 5 jacks are working perfectly, so I applied a coat of hot glue to the soldered area (not pictured) to protect the exposed contacts. Hot glue is not conductive, and is a fantastic way to cover up large exposed areas like this.



Step 5: Unwrapping the Logitech Z-560... what you are looking at here is 400watts RMS output, and I have 3 of these systems (good deal for under $100 each), so 1200watts total. This is very unnecessary for a room in a house, but I'm a monster hehe



Finished setup... 3 subwoofers and 12 satellites...... the result:



hahahaha, actually more of something like this:



hopefully this could give a few people some good ideas... until my next audio project, later guys!

 

Your flat broke yet you can aford 3 of those speaker systems?
[Edit] Spose you could of got it before you were flat broke.

Any way cool idea, Poor sound card though

 

yeah, thats pretty much what happened, I bought the speakers then had like $2 left, heh.

 

Three Z-560's?!?! You're sir, are insane lol Great guide nonetheless

 

this could be usefull for my mp3 but than i need a car battery or we can listen only half and hour with 5 ppl

 

it wouldn't drain your battery anymore... lets say your volume's on 20... thats going to remain the same... the volume might not be so high on the headphones though if you have 5 of them plugged in... I'll give it a test soon... if you're talking about running the z-560s from a car battery, its possible...

lets say you have a 50AH battery (I haven't done this in a while, so bear with me if I'm wrong)...

50 amps x 12v = 600w... so it would run about an hour and a half on full power... this isn't counting power loss from the dc>ac converter.

why thank you!

 

Great guide.
Wired in Parrallel (<-Never can spell that) it would draw more current for each person connected, so if one set of headfones uses 100mA then 5 would use 500mA. Sorry no free music for all your mates.

 

Not really... It all depends on the impedence level of the speakers...

Serial or Parallel, in this case it shouldn't matter because such low voltage being needed...

http://www.termpro.com/articles/spkrz.html

 

Well I meant with earphones, you know that problem evrybody want's to hear that song you say that it is great, and a half hour later evryone has heard it, with something like this 5 people could listen at the same time, but it think it will suck your battery.

need solar cell and some transistahs

 

I know that the quality does depricate but it works perfectly on my laptop. I have one input and three outputs. The quality is decent a little bit of loss but so far no damage done.