> [I]f a stereo headphone is plugged in to the jack on the fron tof the > machine, the audio switches to that jack, but the two channels are > mixed together in such a way as to cause them to cancel each other > out on each headphone.
I'll suggest another possible cause, if I've understood the symptom correctly. Stereo headphones use three conductors: one ear signal, the other ear signal, and common ground. I have occasionally had the ground connection break (usually for fixable reasons, in my cases). This causes the electrical circuit to amount to both ears in series between the two signal conductors, leading to an effectively monaural sound that amounts to the difference between the two channels. If there's a defect in the jack or its connections (which I can imagine being common across a product line or manufacturer), this could at least potentially be responsible for the symptom you're hearing. Of course, it also could be software, as you suggest. One experiment that might help resolve this occurs to me. When I've had a machine crash while playing sound, it usually keeps playing the last short time (50ms?) in a loop. If you break to ddb while sound is playing, I'd expect the same thing to happen. In that state, the driver isn't going to be changing anything, so plugging headphones in then might help you identify whether it's a software issue or not. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML [email protected] / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
