Yep, I have a nice pair of Klipsch "powered" speakers on my p/c. If push came to shove, I could hook them up just for shits and grins. That would answer the question I suppose. But, I have the tv pulled, boxed up and don't feel like climbing under my desk to pull wires etc. to disconnect my p/c speaker and go through the motions right now. I have the hotel LG hooked up in the den now and dug out a universal remote that "somehow" was compatible and it works fine. I'm watching eBay for a base as for now it's just propped against the wall on a shelf (looks like it's wall mounted). Heck, I could prolly just leave it that way and nobody would know the difference. I guess I'll stick the other one in the garage along with the other 10,000 "future projects" and test the speaker thing whenever I have nothing else to do ... which means it'll prolly sit out there until I get the cleaning bug and haul it to the dump. (or when another tv takes a dump and I'm desperate, THEN I'll try hooking speakers up to it).

A/B, it's all disconnected and boxed up now, so I can't check to see if the speakers are "turned off". I do know I went through everything on the menu and don't ever remember seeing an option for turning them on/off (other than mute), but I think I'd have used common sense if I'd seen anything like that as an option. Remember, this all happened when we had a power surge ... the tv was on, we lost power and it came back on in about 1/2 of a second ... just a blink of the eye. Under the circumstances, I believe that fried the audio board. I could be wrong, but it's an "educated" guess.