Thanks, ph! I will give that one a good teardown in August at the same time I do another one with a cracked top case. I've been amassing Pismo parts, I may even have an extra sound board. The Pismo is great to work on, yes, I would rate my technical competence as very average and I did a full teardown of one this spring that had a bad main board, and had a successful operation for that one.

I buy most of my used parts from TonyZZ on eBay - no relation. He does have good pricing and ships very, very quickly.

I bet it is that condition you describe, where the sound is being bumped to the headphone port. Either that or it took a power zap...