Tek-Tips is the largest IT community on the Internet today!

Members share and learn making Tek-Tips Forums the best source of peer-reviewed technical information on the Internet!

  • Congratulations biv343 on being selected by the Tek-Tips community for having the most helpful posts in the forums last week. Way to Go!

Getting audio without speakers?

Status
Not open for further replies.

Psyke

Technical User
Nov 11, 2004
55
CA
Quick Question.

My Workstation has a sound card built into the motherboard, but no audio can be heard unless speakers, or headphones or some other audio outlet is plugged into the jack at the back of the pc..

Is there a way to have the audio generate from the Pc itself without the need for speakers / headphones to be plugged in?

Thanks for any replies!
 
simply because the pc's internal speaker is not jacked into your audio device.

hope this helps. peace! [peace]

kilroy [trooper]
philippines

"If the automobile had followed the same development cycle as the computer, a Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get one million miles to the gallon, and explode once a year, killing everyone inside."
 
If the problem is that you don't want big speakers, you can
get a keyboard with speakers built in.
 
erm... well, you can whistle while you work... that's about as close as you'll get to sound without speakers...

sound cards are just cards that process the sound information, they don't ever include speakers. There are internal speakers, but they are very basic and is mainly used to notify POST errors, and are not connected to your soundcard...

--------------------
Procrastinate Now!
 
I suppose you could generate some low level code to make your PC access the CD, Floppy and HD in extreme ways, might give you some sort of rythmical graunching sounds (and a hardware bill)

I remember back in the heady days of the Sinclair ZX-81 some innovative people were getting it to play pseudo-music by programming code that would create certain sounds on the audio cassette whilst loading. It was crap!! :)
 
I have seen some speakers that are small enough for minimalistic sound that actually go into a 5 1/4" drive bay. I dont expect you are going to get great sound from them, but it would be one possibility. It is basically a drive bay enclosure with 2 small speakers. I dont know if they use an internal sound jack or if you can run a cord out the back of the computer and plug it into the sound card with a mini stereo plug like a normal set of speakers.

I found an example of this:


If you do not like my post feel free to point out your opinion or my errors.
 
Another option might be a monitor with built-in Speakers. Many LCD's have built-in Speakers.

If you do not like my post feel free to point out your opinion or my errors.
 
I once saw a program that plays music through the PC speaker while using the floppy drive as accompanyment. It has a pre-programmed sequence of seeks to send the drive to generate different frequencies.

Also, I've used a program that tests progressively larger hard disk seeks to measure seek times. It produces a nice, smooth sound rising in frequency. I suppose you could write a sound driver that calculates seeks to achieve the desired frequencies.

If you're running Windows 3.1, 3.11 or Windows for Workgroups, there's a nice PC speaker sound driver out there. Hardware interrupts (like mouse movement) tend to screw up the sound, though. There is an option to disable all interrupts during playback, but that means the computer will freeze up when it's playing any sounds.
 
Boy, I'd forgotten about the Win 3.1 speaker drivers. Those were the simple days!
 
Multimedia monitor?
I guess if you were handy, you could make a powered amplified speaker and mount it internally using a spare molex as power.
Loop an audio cable out to the sound card?
Martin

We like members to GIVE and not just TAKE.
Participate and help others.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Part and Inventory Search

Sponsor

Back
Top