 Today I'm going to be testing out a product I recently bought because I have a problem that I really needed to solve. My problem is the speakers that I use at this computer. For a long time I used this old pair of Insignia brand speakers. Insignia is a brand of speakers that Best Buy sold. I bought those cheap pair of speakers like 10 years ago. They were nothing special when I bought them. They're nothing special now. They're just really crappy computer speakers. And if I want to monitor audio, for example like I'm doing my video editing and I want to monitor the audio, those speakers, the sound from them is not very good. It's hard to tell if the sound quality, the video is actually good or not because the speakers are just bad speakers. So I bought a better brand of speakers recently. I bought some Logitech speakers. They're much nicer for monitoring my videos and the audio in my videos. But the problem with that new pair of speakers I bought the Logitech's, they don't have a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack on the speakers themselves. I can't just plug in a headphone to those speakers and actually listen to it on my headphones and then unplug it if I want to listen to the speakers. What I have to do is plug in the speakers obviously to the 3.5 millimeter jack or the port on the computer itself and then I have to plug in my headphones to a different port somewhere on the computer and then I've got headphones and speakers on different audio streams. I don't like fooling with that. And it got to the point where I just used my old speakers anytime I needed to plug in my headphones because it had a port on the front. And then I used the nicer speakers when I wasn't listening to my headphones. So I'm constantly having to go to the back of this computer and it's kind of a pain because I've got so many cables plugged in everywhere and I'm constantly switching from one pair of speakers to the other. So I decided to buy this splitter here. This splitter, if I can get the camera to focus, this is a 4N1, 4N and one out, let me move my finger, or it can be a 1N4 out because you can actually reverse it with this red button. So what I can do here is I can plug four different sets of speakers into this and then the one out here would go to of course the computer. And that allows me to quickly just turn the knob and switch between again up to four different sets of speakers. That is a really cool thing to be able to do. Now these kinds of splitter devices, they're not uncommon because a lot of people have the need to split audio signals, video signals, various different kinds of cables because you're limited sometimes on the ports on computers and things like that. But even though they're not uncommon devices, not too many people need these kinds of devices. They're still kind of niche items, so they can be expensive. When I was looking for this kind of audio splitter for headphones and speaker jacks, these devices were not cheap. So I tried to find the cheapest one I could possibly find and I found this Chinese made audio splitter here on Amazon for $26.99 and I thought, well, that's about the cheapest I can get. It's got four and a half stars. I haven't tried it out yet, so I'm not exactly sure. You guys are going to see me plug it in here in a minute and I'll let you know if this thing actually works or not. I think I'm going to be okay with this as far as, is it cheaply built? Yes. Go ahead and tell you that right now. The thing is very small. It's smaller than a credit card. It's smaller than a Raspberry Pi, but it's very Raspberry Pi-like in the fact that it doesn't actually ship with a proper case. You guys can probably see it's open. You can see all the circuitry and everything in there, right? So it's not an enclosed case, which I guess will be fine, depending on where I put it. You know, I'll have to be careful. You don't want to spill anything on it. But again, for the price, you know, again, I was looking for cheap, so I can't complain too much about the build quality. So let me go ahead and get this thing plugged in and both of my sets of speakers plugged into this. And let me go ahead and also grab my headphones as well. And we're going to see if this thing works. And of course, when I start to plug in the switcher here, I realize I didn't have a male to male 3.5 millimeter audio cable. So I actually had to pause the video for about 20 minutes. I made a quick run to Best Buy to get a cable. And now I've got the splitter plugged into the computer. And then in the four ports in the front, I'm going to plug in three things. I'm going to plug in the two sets of speakers I have, plus just to test it out, I'm going to go ahead and plug in a pair of headphones here, which I can unscrew the big jack and get a 3.5 millimeter connection on the headphones. And now that I've got three different things plugged into the splitter, I should be able to turn the knob from one to two to three and get audio out of each device. So let me switch over to the desktop here. What I'm going to do is I'm just going to play one of my videos from YouTube, because that's safe audio I can play because I own it. I'm not going to get flagged for playing my own stuff. So I'm going to start this video, and I've got the knob turned to one. Now one should be the cheap pair of speakers. So let me take the headphones off to make sure I can hear that. I'm going to play this because the big desktop environments like GNOME, KDE Plasma, and I can verify the cheap pair of speakers were outputting the audio. Now I'm going to turn the knob from one to two, and now it should be the Logitech speakers playing. Take care of this for you. They have built-in programs in those particular cases. And it absolutely does. So that worked. And then I'm going to turn the knob to three, and that should output the audio to my headphones. Two auto-start programs for you. So you go to their auto-start applications program. I love it. Call it in GNOME. Yeah, so a really simple, little device, but it does work. I was kind of worried, again, because I bought like the cheapest thing going and what made me even more worried. I didn't mention this yet, but the little instructions for it is a one page sheet. And it is written in English, but the English is almost unreadable, so it was made in China. And whoever made the instruction manual here, obviously was not fluent in English. Let me read a little bit of the English here. So notice because the new version solved the volume control problem period, end of sentence. So we can cancel the speaker headphone switch period, end of sentence, end before. That's just the two word sentence, end before, period. And then this item with some volume control problem for connect to speaker or headphone period, end of sentence. And then another two word sentence that says please understanding, period, end of sentence. I have no idea what that instruction manual was trying to say, but again, 26.99, I'm pretty happy with the purchase. As long as I get a couple of years of use out of the thing, I think it's money well spent, at least again for the problem I was trying to solve. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode, Devon Gabe James, Maxim Matt, Michael Mitchell, Paul Scott, Wes Allen, Armor Dragon, Chuck Mandarin, Gary Diocai, Dylan George, Lee, Lennox Ninja, Mike Erion, Alexander, Peace, Origin, Vador, Polytech, Rip, Private, Steven, and Willie. These guys, they're my highest tier patrons over on Patreon. Without these guys, this episode would not have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now. These are all my supporters over on Patreon because without these guys, I couldn't afford to do what I do right. I couldn't afford to pay for that splitter. I couldn't afford to buy that 3.5 millimeter audio cable from Best Buy. This thing costs like eight bucks, by the way. That's outrageous. Anyway, guys, look for DistroTube over on Patreon. Peace.