Connecting headphones to a TV that has no headphone jack or audio outputs

A relative of mine needs to have headphones for their TV. They share a room with another person and they want to be able to watch TV late at night without disturbing them. I thought this would be a cinch to set up, but it turns out that my relative's TV has no headphone jack, nor does it have any analog audio outputs (RCAs). All it has for an audio output is a coaxial S/PDIF output. It turns out that the S/PDIF output only works if the TV has a digital signal going into it (which in my relative's case, it does not. It's analog). So that won't do any good.

I went online looking for a RF demodulator and it turns out that those aren't as common as RF modulators. The cheapest one I can find is $75 on eBay and it appears to be mono audio only.

The only cheap solution I can come up with to make this whole thing work is to obtain an old stereo VCR, feed it the analog TV signal, and take the audio outputs of the VCR (RCAs) and input those into a cheap headphone amplifier. Not very elegant, but doable.

Does anyone have any more elegant ideas that won't cost much? I'm trying to keep the entire setup at or below $50.

 

When I was a kid, my parents gave me an old 13" TV. My dad drilled a hole in the side of it and installed an 1/8" headphone connector from Radio Shack. It was wired directly into the speaker feed and was a jack that interrupted the signal to the speaker when it had a plug inserted.

After a bit of Google searching, I'm unable to find such a jack anymore. You can get a 1/4" switching jack, or you could use a non-switching 1/8" jack with a switch next to it. Good luck.

 

What's the make/model of the TV?

 

Is the TV connected to a cable box via HDMI? Usually the cable box will have analog out connectors.

The audio coming from the TV is always going be digital, because analog TV broadcasts went away several years ago. Either the TV or the cable box is converting the digital to analog for output to the speakers.

 

I'm having the same problem with my parents system. It seems that analog audio outputs are a thing of the past, so I can't hook up their wireless headphone box to the TV. Right now I am using their amp's headphone jack to send signal to the headphone box, but they have to pull the jack if they want to listen to the speakers. Anyone know of a modern amplifier with 5:1 speaker outs and with RCA Main Outs?