Do stereo splitters reduce quality?

yerjam · 4 Sep 2012 at 15:13

Hi all.

The headphone jack on my case has stopped working; rather than attempt to fix it I thought about making use of the headphone jack on my keyboard. Unfortunately my soundcard (Asus Xonar DGX 5.1 PCI-Express) only has one audio output which is currently running into my speakers which have no headphone out.

So I was thinking of using a stereo splitter like this and splitting the audio between the speakers and the headphone jack on the keyboard. My question is, will this reduce audio quality at all or introduce any noise or distortion?

I realise with this set-up I would have to turn my speakers down/off any time I want to use headphones but that's a small trade-off.

tom_e · 4 Sep 2012 at 15:31

Yes, but would it be noticeable in normal usage? Probably not.

Phal · 4 Sep 2012 at 18:03

I believe they can also reduce volume

yerjam · 6 Sep 2012 at 12:14

For anyone interested I tried out the stereo splitter today. Works like a charm; sounds the same to me with or without it installed. There is a loss in volume but only when the speakers and the headphones are running at the same time, but like I say, in normal use I'll be turning off the speakers when I plug the headphones in.