[Editor's note: This tip was submitted last weekend by Argano]
Try pressing the key combo option+mute - this opens the system prefs directly to your sound window pane. Seems to work in both classic and carbon apps
I'm running 10.0.3 build 4P13
Hopes this helps someone out.
[On my machine (G4/733), this brought the System Prefs app to the foreground, but didn't display the window (quite odd!). And repeatedly pressing option-mute caused my machine to go into slow-motion mode and pegged the CPU meter at 100% utilization. Not sure what happened, but everything was fine after I restarted. Not sure if that's specific to my machine or not, so try this trick at your own risk. -rob.]
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=2001061911243132