Wow, thank you so much for the in depth explanation!!
I finally had a minute to read these and research some more, and I think I’m gonna try the adapter first. I was thinking of ordering this other model of adapter I found on amazon, do you think it would also work? It has the same 14-pin SATA cable, but it’s $100 cheaper xD regardless thank you, I was very overwhelmed by the amount of info online about audio customization and you helped greatly by breaking it down into a few ideal options.
You should be able to add an AUX cord pretty easily; something like this