Source Guru

This is a sort of “Dear LazyWeb” post.

As I’m moving to a new place on sunday, I’m going to have some restrictions on when I can use loudspeakers (so as to not disturb other people), but at the moment, I’ve got a few places where I’m using different audio sources, for example, when I’m using my PC, I might be either playing music through my PC, listening to the DAB Radio I have in the background, watching TV at the same time, etc etc.

What I need (want) is a solution so that I can have a box on my desk which allows me to select from a range of inputs, and flick between outputting to the speakers, or to headphones.

While at the moment, every item I have seperate speakers. My Surround has 4 inputs (1 aux, 3 for surround – all 3.5mm Jacks) and my headphones have a single 3.5 mm jack.

What I’d like to do is be able to wire the following into a box, and then have a button to switch between using the speakers on the surround, and the headphones.

• PC – 3 3.5mm Jacks for surround
• Laptop – Single 3.5mm Jack
• DAB Radio – single 3.5mm Jack
• TV – single 3.5mm Jack
• Mixer – currently going through PC, but has 2 x Mono 1/4″ jacks out (which I’ve already converted to a single 3.5mm Jack at the other end)

I’d like it if I could listen to multiple resources at the same time. However, at the moment, I think that the main issue is going to be converting the Surround into stereo for the headphones… The single 3.5 Jacks can be output to the “Aux” channel…

I don’t know if anyone knows of any solutions for this, or wants to help me build one (anyone good with creating circuit diagrams) – and I’m sure there’ll be issues with different sources.

I mean, I could probably just pipe all but the surround through the mixer… and then use the headphone override on the speakers, but I don’t really want to have the issue of plugging and unplugging the headphone jack all the time. I’d rather just hit a button.

Any thoughts?