Output to Multiple Devices (Headphone & Bluetooth Speakers) in Vista

[comuser]

I have a IBM Thinkpad with Vista. I need to use the sound output to multiple devices. In my case it would be:
1. Headphone (using the head phone slot in the front of the laptop with green color coding on the outlet)
2. Bluetooth wireless speakers

Few of you may ask why I need the sound in both. Even though it sounds funny / silly, I thought with it would be nice to have 2 front speakers and 2 rear speakers (wireless) and a woofer. With the laptop connected to the TV, using TV as the secondary monitor, and by connecting the head phone slot to the TV audio IN, I have got the 2 front speakers. Now when I turn on my wireless Bluetooth 2.1 Speakers, they could act as 2 rear speakers with a woofer. Now you may understand why I need sound in both the outputs.

Any thought / help would be appreciated

 

[Harvey]

Even if you get this to work, I think you'll have problems trying to use bluetooth encoded audio and the direct output from your motherboard at the same time for two reasons:

1. There may be a delay from the audio fed into the bluetooth transmitter to the time it plays in the receiving speakers because it takes a finite amount of time to encode the audio to bluetooth. If the delay is perceivable, it could be a very unpleasant effect.

2. Bluetooth encoding is so bad for phone conversations that I won't use it, and I often ask my friends with bluetooth earsets to hang up and call me when they get to a real handset. It would be even worse if you expect actual musicality from the sound you get through the system. It wouldn't matter if you're just transmitting material that's already encoded to a low bit rate in a phone because it's alreay FUBAR.

Sorry to be a wet blanket on your idea, but as a musician and engineer, I wouldn't waste time, let alone money, trying to use bluetooth for music if I cared about the sound... and I do.

 

[mfenn]

It's not possible to make Windows automagically send sound to two difference devices at the same time. Dumb I know, since really all they would have to do from an OS point of view is to dump the bitstream into two buffers instead of one. But I digress.

You can replicate the functionality to some degree with Virtual Audio Cable, but it costs money.