I was on-line looking for an S/PDIF audio cable. For any that do not know what that is here is a link.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S/PDIFAnyway... The TV tuner on my media system will not allow me to set whether to use audio from HDMI or my Realtec sound chip but DOES allow itself to be set to use S/PDIF which would equate to the Realtec audio. Well I had the choice of a standard or mini plug. My sound system takes a mini but I didn't know which was the output on my system. So I go through the pain of pulling the tower out of its nitch to check.
Hmmm, I can't find the port. Looking up the specs for my motherboard to find where the danged thing is located I find that I don't have an S/PDIF port. Glad I looked before ordering a cable! No big deal as I can still mute and unmute the audio for the two sources I use for watching U.S. football. The advantage would have been that, with S/PDIF, I could have changed audio sources with just a click on a remote. My next motherboard WILL have S/PDIF!
The laugh at myself part is that this is not the first time I went looking for a cable I didn't need. A little while back I got a new video card that needs two 6 pin power connectors from the power supply and I was sure that my power supply only had one... I looked. So I buy an adaptor to combine two Molex connectors to one 6 pin. So now I'm all set and pull everything out to change cards. Sigh, my power supply is mounted in the bottom of the case. I KNOW that I tend to drop screws and need to cover the fan vent for the power supply. Knowing full well that I NEED to do this; of course I did not. As you have probably guessed I now have the screw that mounts the old video card flopping around inside of my power supple so I now need to pull out the power supply to get the danged screw out of the thing. All is cool. Turn the power supply up-side-down and a few shakes later and I have that dastardly and devious screw in hand and under control (it DID put up a pretty good battle). Sigh, also sitting there looking totally innocent, was the second 6 pin connector that I needed for the video card. Actually there was also a third 6 pin connector peeking around a corner snickering at me. When I built the system I just tucked away the extra cables so well that they could not be seen with the power supply mounted. That is the official story. Personally I'm going with a conspiracy theory in both cases! These cables and ports all got together and decided to mess with their pet human.