You learn something new every day

I just learned something new about my motherboard (an Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe - a very nice Athlon64 socket 939 board, though I have not taken advantage of the SLI capability and probably never will).

This motherboard features an integrated surround sound audio card (ATI IXP150 AC'97). It's not spectacular, but it is surround sound. I've played around with the thing a bit, but I've never connected more than 2 speakers to it. But my case does have front panel audio jacks which connect to an internal connector on the motherboard - these front panel jacks only support stereo output. I have my speakers plugged into the rear jacks.

I rarely use the front jack, but I wanted to test out my $150 headphones because I left them too close to the heater and melted the hard plastic earpiece cover and I wanted to make sure that nothing inside was damaged (it's not, they still sound awesome and I don't care about the purely cosmetic damage).

I was playing some Silly Wizard (If I was a Blackbird - one of my all time most favorite songs) and on a whim picked up the headphones and plugged them into the front jack. I could hear the sound coming out of the headphones before putting them on, but I was surprised that the speakers went silent. I did not know that the audio output was designed this way - I just thought that the stereo output was duplicated to the internal connectors for the front panel, it's not, it's switched so that using it mutes the rear stereo jack. cool.