Thank you both for your suggestions. Having experimented further, I
find that, as I expected, the earpieces are completely inaudible when
they are not in my ear (they are just the little ear-bud type of
thing).
The default connections shown bu aJackCtl are:
System(capture) to qTractor and PulseAudio JACK Source
qTractor and PulseAudio JACK Sink to System(playback)
This seems about right, to me, I experimented with removing the
connections to/from PulseAudio, but this doesn't make any difference to
the problem I have been getting. I also experimented with muting
various things in Pavu, without any success.
So either I am doing something very basic completely wrongly (quite
likely!), or perhaps there is some sort of crossover going on in my
sound card between input and output.
I did attempt to repeat my experimental recording on my desktop
computer, but couldn't figure out how to get the input from my webcam's
microphone into qTractor. When I start Jack, the System(capture) node
doesn't appear in the connections graph at all.
David