I was searching topics to see if this was already covered, but couldn’t find anything. I’m using Windows 11 on my FW16 with the Audio Expansion Card. Going to be traveling soon, and when talking to my buddy over there he brought up connecting my Framework 16 to one of his old Mixing consoles. The physical cables are easy enough to match up, but he was wondering if the laptop supported Line Out. I have an Audio Expansion Card, and it works just fine with headphones, but I can’t tell from other forum topics here if the card has an auto-detection for Line-Out mode. Simply to get a stable voltage level to the gear. Obviously, we can swag this a little bit by just adjusting the volume until we get somewhere close to the desired level, but if it has a dedicated Line-Out mode, that would certainly make it easier. I know on most of the systems I’ve had, the jack simply auto-detects the device impedance and can determine that it should go into Line-Out mode. Didn’t know if such a feature existed in the DAC / AMP used in the Audio Expansion Card.
It works with my 2.1 Desktop speaker system, so I’d say it does support Line-Out.
In fact I’ve only seen headphones-only connectors with an integrated amplifier on older portable cassette recorder systems back in the 90’s and later on a few portable CD-Players. Beside those, afaict you can use any headphone connector to connect stuff you’d usually connect via Line-Out. At least that’s what I did without any issues so far.