Pretty much what the title says. How many people would like separate speaker and mic jacks on one card.
I’m a student 8 months into an electronics engineering degree and this is something I’ve wanted on my laptop since I got it. But as far as I can tell, it’s never been implemented by anyone. As such I’m considering designing one myself although admittedly I don’t really know what I’m doing.
My Ideal topology would be one TRRS Combo Jack and one TRS dedicated Mic Jack. This way you could use combo headphones with full functionality, or if you plug in a dedicated mic, it takes priority over the mic feed from the combo mic. However I’m having difficulty finding an audio IC that would support this in one chip, so I may just use one TRS Speaker Jack and one TRS Mic Jack.
Any feature requests or Audio IC/Codec recommendations or just acknowledgement that you’d like this so I can gauge interest are greatly appreciated.
I how no idea how noisy a audio jack is from a RF perspective on modern Laptops but as a HAM radio operator I could see people could find it useful to have more soundcard inputs to be able to send and receive digital modes. Something worth looking up is if there are any research/measurements of seperate audio jacks are more noisy than a combined one.
I didn’t even know there was a difference. I’m not an audiophile myself, I just find it incredibly inconvenient when I need a splitter or combiner to use a headset depending on the computer. I’ll definitely look into this, although briefly looking it up it seems that it may mean additional ICs which will be difficult considering how space constrained it already is with 2 jacks and a USB Audio Codec (the only ones I’ve found are designed around headsets rather than line-in/combination) so I’m not sure how feasible it will be. Thank you for this, it’s exactly the sort of input I was looking for that I hadn’t thought of yet.
I’m not an audiophile, but I’ve got some interest in microphones and I’ve got a few different mics at home. I personally wouldn’t have any interest in such a card.
If I wanted to have high quality audio, I would lean towards having an entire unit that was separate (like a box on my desktop) that I would assume (?) could achieve better sound than a small expansion card.
If I wanted practicality more-so than audio quality, I would opt for USB-mics.
So in my personal use-cases, I wouldn’t see a place for such an audio expansion card you’re describing.