Disable speakers but not headphones

[SteveBentley]

We have some all-in-one Dell Studio One 19 machines, on which I'd like to kill the speakers, which would be fairly easy to do by disabling the drivers for the sound card (Realtek, btw).

 

But we need to keep the sound working if headphones are used.

 

There's nothing useful in the BIOS to disable the speakers as far as I can tell.

 

I'm upgrading them to XP Pro from the supplied Vista, in a vanilla AD environment.

 

Does anyone have any pointers?

[SC-UK]

Can you not just pull the speaker connection from inside the machines? I assume they have internal speakers?

[mac_shinobi]

you should be able to use the realtek audio manager to select the headphone socket / jack as the default audio output and do it that way - short of that as above disconnect the internal cable either for the output from the back or disconnect the onboard speaker.

[p858snake]

Try having a look at the SetVol and Mute utilities and then script them.

[powdarrmonkey]

If they have a speaker connection at the back and headphones at the front, just put a cable into the back but don't connect the other end. The speakers will be mute but headphones plugged into the front will function normally.

[SteveBentley]

Thanks for all the input guys.

 

I'm not sure the setvol approach is going to work as that appears to affect the headphone socket as well as the speakers.

 

I can't see any option in the Realtek HD Audio Manager to set the headphone socket as default.

 

The stick a dead lead in option sounds like a very good shout though!

[Fraserb82]

Hi,

 

I was wondering if you ever found a solution for this one Steve, and if you did, can you remember it all these years later?

[Arthur]

I think nircmd can do what you want...

 

http://nircmd.nirsoft.net/changesysvolume.html