I have two audio outputs (F and R) on my PC connected to speakers. If there's a signal coming out of R, I'd like F output to go to F speakers and R output to R speakers. If there is no audio coming out of R, I would like the F signal to be routed to the R speakers as well. If there is an R signal it should be out put immidiately. If there is no R signal, it's ok or even preferred if it takes a few seconds to switch F through to R. The circuit should be 5V powered from the same PC.
That was the technical description. Here's the reason why:
I'm usually running stereo speakers connected to the F output for most things. But when listening to music or watching movies (which can have true surround, so I want those extra channels and not always a copy of the front ones) I have a second pair of rear speakers which are connected to the "rear" output jacks on my mainboard. Now there lies the problem. My mainboard has a crappy realtek audio chip. Apparently realtek hasn't managed to make a decent driver in a decade and fix the issues with software speaker fill (as a lot of google results will show you). While playing audio from a surround source is fine, to stereo the speaker fill either does nothing or distorts the output by applying echo and frequency filtering. Btw. speaker fill worked perfectly fine with a VIA audio chip and its drivers I had on my last mainboard.
Any ideas how to achieve this? A double-pole-double-throw switch doesn't count. It's not automatic
. I'm not crazy about audio quality. Everything will sound better than what realtek drivers are doing to my audio.