In Third Person

Recently, my PlayStation 3D TV died an unfortunate (yet apparently common) death. To remedy the problem, I decided to buy a new TV. Unfortunately, the new TV was missing something that the PlayStation 3D TV had: a headphone jack. The vast majority of televisions do not come with headphone jacks, which would have been problematic in Steff and I’s shared living space.

I could have bought wireless headphones, which are built to support televisions. Or, I could have done a Google search for a cheaper alternate solution. In this post, I’ll run you through the process of plugging in any set of headphones into your TV!

What You’ll Need

– One 2 x RCA Male / 1 x 3.5mm Stereo Female Y-Cable
(Bottom) Not easy to find. I tried department stores, electronic stores and specialty audio/video stores with no luck. I eventually found this cable at a music store.

– One Headphone Volume Control
(Top) Also not easy to find. I eventually gave up and just bought this on Amazon. If you can find it at a store, great. If not, there’s handy Amazon links to both pieces above.

How To Do It

1. Locate the Audio Out ports on your television. Most modern televisions have audio out ports on them. These are the ports you’ll use instead of a traditional headphone jack.

2. Plug the Y cable into the audio out port.

3. Though you can plug your headphones directly into the Y cable, odds are the sound will either be way too low or way too high. You can fix this with the headphone volume controller. Plug the headphone volume controller into the female end of the Y cable.

4. Now plug your headphones into the other end of the volume controller. You should have fully controllable sound coming out of your headphones now!

5. For some televisions, having something plugged into the audio out doesn’t disable the TV speakers. To take care of this, you may need to go into your TV settings and disable them.

Though finding the parts isn’t the easiest task in the world, I ended up saving a lot more money setting it up this way than by spending a large chunk of change on wireless headphones specifically designed to hook up to the TV. I can now game again without disrupting my girlfriend’s TV watching.