Optical Digital Out, will it work?

[rotter2142]

I have a Macbook Pro (13" Mid 2009 model).

My 3.5mm analog headphone jack has stopped working. It produces sound but with a lot of hissing and at a volume that is 1/10th of what it used to be. Also if I crank up the volume really high I can notice that the lower range of the spectrum is not being reproduced and only some mid frequency's are being reproduced.

The in-built speakers on the other hand are just working fine without any problems.

I wanted to know that if I buy a DAC(Fiio D3) which utilizes a Optical output, will my system be able to output that through the jack, seeing that both the analog line and digital line share the same port?

I cannot test it with an optical out as I don't have the required products with it.

Is there any way of checking if it works? I'm not able to access any system which utilizes a digital out.

As my system is out of warranty what will be the expected cost if I get it done/checked at the customer service center?

 

[Detrius]

It's the same port, but it's treated completely differently. A short in the analog portion will have no affect on the optical portion. About the only thing I would expect to be specific to the jack is whether it properly detects what's plugged in, and so long as it's doing that, I would expect the digital to work. I don't know for certain, as I've not come across this specific issue. I bet if you head over to your local Radio Shack, they'd be more than happy to let you try it out, so long as you wind up buying a cable from them.

Fixing it is not really an option. It's part of the logic board and would be atrociously expensive. You'd be better off hooking up an external USB sound card.