Originally posted by: Peter
This "poor" implementation is exactly the loopback capable design I was speaking of; the jumpers are closing the circuit to the rear jacks when no front jacks are connected at all. This requires BETTER front jacks that loop the signal back through the "return" wire when the jack is unused.
Bottom line: Stop complaining about the mainboard - this is the best approach there is. It's your case front connectors where an important feature is missing.
Well I disagree with you completely. Obviously the cases are not coming with normally closed headphone jacks, so yes the case makers (including Antec who sells my case) should be using normally closed jacks to hide a poor design by the motherboard makers.
Do you not think it would be better to have a splitter that would allow signal to be sent to the front ports and leave the rear ports alone? Even if say, the front out ports were disabled I would be fine with it, and have my speakers plugged into the rear out, however when the loopback is disabled none of the rear ports work.
Even if they had a jumper to allow you to pick between having the front ports a clone of the rear and the current system it would be better than "the best approach there is"
As a computer engineer myself it's disgusting to know how little effort and hardware it would take to have a better system than they use now.