Sorry MotionMan, for my comments to you the other day. I was at work, and extremely frustrated at the situation. I'm not a complete idiot, and I did as much research myself as I possibly could before coming here. I guess what I was looking for was somebody who had the same issue as I was having and managed to find a fix.
It's clear to me now that this is definitely a hardware issue. There is some kind of lose connection between the logic board and the earpiece speaker. According to
this link it may just be that the prongs are not making proper contact. There are links to pictures on that page as well, but the links are broken. I've got the necessary pentalobe and #00 phillips screwdriver to take everything apart, but without pictures to know what I'm looking for, I'm hesitant to try to repair it myself.
The other option is to take it to a shop. I called around today. It's going to be $30-$70 to fix my problem. $30 if they just need to fix a loose connection. $70 if they need to actually replace the entire earpiece speaker.
I don't know what to do... all I know is that I want to get this phone working, and keep it that way for as long as possible.
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