[One (M7) Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] fujisan582:
Hope someone on here can help me; I've searched everywhere can could not find a solution. The technician who worked on the phone for over 10-15 hours over 1 month looked at me in despair and said "I have no clue"; I thought he was going to start crying.

Everything but the camera worked perfectly before the technician opened the phone to start working in it a month ago. It went downhill from there.

Sequence of events

1. Had a camera problem (constantly out of focus) on my US HTC One Dev edition that started 6 months after owning the phone, which I absolutely loved. Searched and found this was a hardware issue.

2. I'm in Canada with a US phone, so no warranty. HTC wants $200 and 3-6 weeks to fix it. Local shop wants $75. After asking if they knew how to fix this specific phone and that they had the tools, I leave it with them.

3. They installed the new camera, damaged my top speaker grille and phone side, and the screen is uneven (technician: worst phone I have ever seen to repair) If you want an idea of the process have a look at the ifixit website.

4. I order top grille for replacement ($10) from ebay. I realize the screen is has not been properly installed and after 2 days I have a purple dead pixel.

5. I leave for a trip with my family over the Holidays - I start taking photos in low light, guess what? Damn purple issue starts. The new camera was an omnivision from a bad batch (pre-Nov 2013). Fortunately, as a true geek I brought another camera with me, just in case.

6. I order a new camera myself from etradesupply $30 plus $20 shippling = $50. 2 more weeks go by.

7. I receive the grille and get the phone back to the technician, he puts it back together, but the grille won't bend and stick to the phone.

8. New camera arrives and Iget the phone back to the technician to install it, which he does.

9. I come back to pick up the phone - screen is all pixelated and dies shortly thereafter.

10. Technician proposes to swap screen from a bricked One he has from another customer. I hesitate, but agree; just want a working phone already. Donnor phone is pretty much destroyed in the process.

11. Back at the shop to pick up my phone: everything finally looks great. I realize back home that the sim card cannot be detected, and that the speakers make a bad creakling noise when volume is higher than 8 or 9 or at normal levels during a phone call

12. Back at the shop - he fixes the sim card issue (pooly connected wire), speaker issue remains and we have no clue where it's coming from. That's were we are at.

Lessons learned for both of us:

The HTC One is a fantastic phone...until it breaks.

technicians should refuse to repair the HTC One, it's almost guaranteed that they will damage something

I should have sent the phone to HTC for 4 weeks paid $200, pay $100 for a loaner phone and be done with the problem...

Problem description

Problem is blatant when volume is at 8 or 9 or more, but is also there at lower volumes, and during phone calls at any volume, there is a creaking noise from the speakers mostly top one. When we press on the grilles the problem is slightly better.

When the whole phone (electronics) was outside the aluminum unibody frame the noise would stop. As soon as we inserted the top end of the phone assembly into the aluminum frame the noise started.

When beatsaudio is off problem is not as bad.

We inspected the motherboard, daughterboard, casing, speakers and everything looks fine (i.e. nothing broken or missing).

Questions

1. Speaker worked perfectly before the technician swapped the screen and reassembled the phone. It's kind of odd that both speakers started having the same issue at the same time. Is it worth trying to replace the speakers with new ones?

2. Could it be interference from something that was not properly put together?

3. Should I use the phone as a hammer, throw it as far as I can from the top of a 30-story building, in a river from a dam, put it in a bucket filled with fuel, or tie it to a propane tank and shot a bullet into it?

Thanks so much for any help!