Help - speakers suddenly stopped working

Hi,

I was playing a CD in iTunes today, at first I was listening with the internal speakers, then plugged in some external speakers (I did not stop the CD playing), and powered them on. When the CD came to the end I unplugged the external speakers. Since then I've not been getting any sound from my eMac's (800MHz w/ superdrive, OS 10.2.8) internal speakers - they've always worked well up until now. Sound is coming through fine on headphones and the external speakers.

I noticed that I had not switched off the power to the external speakers before I unplugged them, could this have caused some problem?

I've checked the sound preferences for 'Output' and it says 'Built-in Audio Controller' - there's no other option when headphones/external speakers are unplugged.

I've restarted the machine - just in case - but no joy.

Could this be a driver or firmware (or whatever it's called) problem? It seems strange that both left and right have gone at the same time, and that there's no noise/hiss coming from them, just silence.

Any help would be most welcome.

Cheers,

Tracy