Chosen Solution
I bought the ifixit lighting port directly from the website and after replacing the part step by step i turned the phone on and the loud speaker was no longer working. I verified using the headphone jack that the phone was outputing audio and also did everything i could think of to rule out a software problem; even rolling back to the factory IOS version. I was wondering if anybody could shed some light on this for me.
It sounds like a defective Lightning Port. If you want to be certain, you could connect the old one (presumably a charging issue?) and see if the audio outputs from the speaker. If the old one had the same audio issue, then the problem is probably elsewhere. If you believe the issue is with the Lightning Port, please contact iFixit support.
