Stream sound from Macbook Pro to another device?

Question

So my headphone jack just half-died on me. I get full sound from the right ear, but the left one has little to no sound coming through. I've had headphone jack issues in the past with my macbook pro and they said I needed to replace the entire motherboard last time which was extremely expensive. My warranty has run out so doing that again would not be feasible, yet I really need the headphone jack to be working since much of my work is video/audio intensive. Is there any way I could stream audio to another device like my phone or something via bluetooth and plug headphones into that to get full sound in both ears? Or is there a fix to this issue that I don't know about? Any tips or advice would be greatly appreciated!
Macbook Pro 13-inch (early 2010)
2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
10 GB 1067 MHz DDR3
OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.5)

Answer 1

You can stream audio via airtunes to an Airport express which has an analogue ouput jack, but it's line level and doesn't have a volume control, but you can use it as the source for a hifi.  You can get third party powered speakers which receive airtunes.  You can stream audio and video to an Apple TV but it only has an optical Tosslink audio out and audio and video out via hdmi.
You can also get sound out via USB to a an offboard D/A converter which in most cases would be line-level, though you could likely find asomething with a headphone output with a volume control.
If you look up the specs on your machine you might also find you have digital audio out via tosslink and the headphone jack which is misbehaving as the ports are combined on some models.  Then there is the mini display port which can in some cases output both sound and audio and you can get a long display port to hdmi cable a lot cheaper than an ATV.
But, while the headphone jack replacement involves a motherboard swap, in reality, what might have happened is that a solder joint for the socket on the motherbord has failed and simply resoldering the joint would fix the issue.  If the internals of the socket like a contact breaking or being damaged is the problem then the MB would likely need replacing given the cost of labour for a tech to source and replace the whole socket.