Hi,

My NTT Model 8515 laptop had an charging port short, which made quite a large hole in the PCB. After bodging it together just enough not to short stuff I managed to get the board up and running.

My first issue I came across was the internal speakers being pretty much dead silent on full volume (I needed to put my ear right up to it to barely hear anything). Same goes for the external speakers, although those were a little bit louder on full volume (still, not enough to hear with normal background noise). Realtek sound test sounded "fine", albeit when I tried to play anything in WMP I got disorted sound (once it went up, then down, etc.). Oddly the BIOS beep option actually worked fine, probably since PC also uses those speakers as the beeper.

So then I had an extremely good idea to put a different speaker inside it from an Asus laptop (4ohms with unknown watts, maybe 1.5W) before I try to do an crappy 3302B JRC audio amp to confirm my thesis). Sadly, even after replacing that speaker for the original 4ohm 1.0W I got completely no sound, only noise. External jack worked like before. Now POST beep settings sometimes works, most of the time it doesn't on the internal speaker.

Forum posts say that, after the short on power jack, the ALC268 also gives up, but they didn't say how. I suspect it could be the ALC268, but I don't have any viable replacements on hand nor on aliexpress (all are without realtek markings). One mentioned the APA2056A getting hot after replacing the ALC268.

I do not know whether it is the audio amp (APA2056A) or the ALC268 codec. The audio amp is too expensive just to buy for this repair (~52.43zł w/o shipping on ali for 10pcs).
Any ideas?