Bought a secondhand laptop to take some of the wear and tear off of my daily driver, and spent the better part of the afternoon and most of the evening trying to get the sound working. Sound card was detected, the headphones worked, and it acted like sound was playing but the speakers weren’t making a peep.

Messed around with every Pipewire setting I could find, tried re-mapping the internal “pins” with some obscure JACK utility, tried several kernel flags, and went down several more rabbit holes that looked promising all to no avail.

Finally took the thing apart, and the speakers were just disconnected from the motherboard 🤦‍♂️ Apparently the refurbishing company forgot to re-attach them.

All in all, not bad for a $150 “beater” laptop.