Television optical out to headphone amplifier

mattius1989 · 30 Oct 2016 at 11:46

Hi.

I'm currently running an LX5090 TV with the OEM soundbar which is hooked up through stereo speaker wire connectors. It sounds great, but the thing is really loud for late night viewing and i find myself making adjustments on the remote constantly for the sake of my housemate. This really pulls me out of what I'm watching. I want to have a set of decent cinema headphones that I can turn to in the midnight hour but need some advice on the connectivity and equipment I need.

I've tried plugging into the headphone port on the side of the TV but that obviously cuts out the soundbar sound and I don't want to have to keep plugging and unplugging connections. By my deductions, that leaves an optical out which will run to a headphone amplifier. I've tried a cable in the port and it leave the soundbar output intact but i don't have anything to run it to at present to be sure that it won't be an issue once it's all eventually set up.

Have any of you had experience with this? Will it cut out the TV sound or work independently? If this will work, can you recommend a decent amplifier and set of headphones?

mattius1989 · 30 Oct 2016 at 23:57

The soundbar can only be connected via speaker wires.

mattius1989 · 2 Nov 2016 at 12:11

They are bare speaker wires going into those plugs were you temporarily click them back to put the wire in. It's a PDP-S63 (http://www.whathifi.com/pioneer/pdp-s63/specs).

mattius1989 · 2 Nov 2016 at 14:30

I thought about the optical out of the telly to a headphone amp. Would the headphones amp control the volume?

The more I read into it, the more I'm thinking I would be best off picking up a cheap hdmi av receiver and run everything through that to the telly.

mattius1989 · 2 Nov 2016 at 16:08

Thanks.

It's occurred to me that I've got an old LG all in one DVD receiver in the loft that accepts optical in and has a headphone out. I'll get this out tonight so I can test the optical out of the TV.

What sort of difference is there between this and dedicated headphone amps and what are the deciding technical attributes I need to look for in a solid headphone amp?