[Nexus 7 General] earlyberd:
EDIT: After a few days of comparing sound quality with a working Nexus 7, I decided I could do better than the Eee PC speakers. I have another set of better speakers I ordered directly from a components distributor on the way, and I'll post an update when they come in. Link

I'm another unlucky Nexus 7 owner to have their speakers blow out through normal usage. Unfortunately none of the temporary fixes seemed to work, and it's entirely possible that I made my speakers worse through trying them. I had crackling on both speakers, and at any volume. So, I submitted a RMA to Asus about two weeks ago and never received a response.

Then I got the bright idea of removing the speakers altogether to see if I could shoehorn together a custom solution. I'm documenting my findings here in case any of you want to give it a shot yourself and don't particularly care about voided warranties. Yes, you are voiding your warranty simply by taking apart your device. And no, I don't think you should try this if you're afraid of soldering irons. For those of you that are comfortable handling burning hot metal rods, this should otherwise be a pretty simple process. I've burned myself countless times, and even I was able to complete this mod in about 45 minutes.

The first step is that you need to buy a set of small laptop speakers, preferably something that has been gutted from a netbook. Speakers come in all shapes and sizes, so ideally you want something as small as possible and doesn't require much power. Impedance and resistance values are negligible, since the worst thing that could happen when you plug in slightly larger speakers with different values is that your device isn't as loud as before. Once I was ready, I went on eBay and started looking at Asus Eee PC speakers, since I thought the odds are good that Asus re-uses a lot of connectors and speaker sizes in their devices (later I found out this was not entirely true). I also did some Googling just to get an idea of what kind of sound quality I could expect from Eee speakers, and most people seemed to think they were okay. I ended up with some speakers from an Eee PC 1005HAB.

Big thanks to Lokheed for this steal at just over $5 with free shipping. That's half the cost to ship the entire Nexus 7 back to Asus for repair.

The connector looked similar enough to the original for the Nexus 7 speakers that I thought maybe I could get away with doing zero soldering, but unfortunately when they got here the connector was easily twice the size. The other problems were that the pin layout on the connector was different (Vcc, Gnd, Vcc, Gnd versus the Nexus 7's Vcc, Gnd, Gnd, Vcc), and the solder joints for the speakers were hidden inside of the plastic casing. The speakers were much bigger overall, too, which meant things were going to get tricky for ensuring there was enough clearance to actually install them.

This is the point where I realized I had taken a gamble and was on the verge of losing, though luckily it was only a $5 gamble. I immediately set to work on trying to pry apart the plastic housing to remove as much extra plastic as I could. The housing itself was held together with some epoxy, so I had to run a blade through it before prying. Then to get it started, I used a pair of pliers as a makeshift nutcracker to crack one side open so I could fit a spudger in to start prying it apart.

The empty shells from the backs of the speakers. I have no idea why one of them seemed to be more difficult than the other. Luckily without the plastic housing, the speakers ended up being just barely thin enough to still fit. I took some tin snips to the edges and trimmed off as much as I could without breaking the frame on the membranes, then I just stripped the original speaker connector wires and soldered directly to the speakers.

When soldering, just de-solder the old wires from the speakers first and take note of the black vs red/white wires. The 7's speaker wires use red for Vcc and brown for Gnd, so solder the brown wire to where the black wire was, and the red wire to the other one. Simple!

Finally, I powered on my device and ran through a few Youtube videos to test that the speakers worked. Success!

After that I just secured them in place with a dab of hot glue and sealed everything back up. I will say that the speakers are definitely not as loud as the originals, which is to be expected since they're bigger and the Eee PC obviously has more juice to drive the speakers. However, they are a bit clearer than the originals, and it's much better than waiting around for Asus to put another set of speakers in that will probably blow out after a month again. Later on I might consider buying a few extra sets of original speakers in case I get tired of the low volume, but for right now I'm satisfied.