iPad speaker upgrade for x230 By replacing the original speakers with those from an iPad mini 1st or 2nd gen, you will get much better sound quality, although the volume will not increase by much. Required Hardware: • Left and right speakers from iPad mini 1st or 2nd gen • Think wire • Heat shrink • Epoxy or hot glue Steps Remove the keyboard and palm rest by removing the labelled screws on the back of the device. Remove the screw circled in red to remove the sound bar. Also unplug the cable (circled in green) the sound bar connects to. The wire may be tucked under the motherboard. Now we will add cabled to the speakers. At the side of each speaker, there will be two pads sticking out. On each pad there will be a plastic covering, remove this with a knife. Bend the two contacts apart and solder a cable to each pad. Add heat shrink onto each cable and then add hot glue to act as strain relief. Repeat this for the other speaker. Moving back to the laptop, in order to install the speakers, we will have to temporarily remove the Bluetooth daughter board (circled) On the right, the speaker will fit fine, but on the left, some features of the bottom shell are in the way The metal is very brittle so you can break it away with a pair of long nosed pliers. I forgot to take a photo of this step but you need to remove the following It will still be hard to get the speaker under the express card slot so temporarily remove the screw in blue Slide the speaker that has the cables on the right when the rounded side is facing down and towards you under the express card until it hits the PCB. Then add some epoxy or hot glue to secure it. The other speaker fits easily and just glue it in place. Next cut the old connector off and solder the cables from the new speakers to the old connector. Wiring like this: Make the cables as short as possible and put heat shrink over them. The original speaker bar contained the magnet used for waking the laptop on lid open. You could try to glue the old magnet in place, but I modified the old speaker bar to fit in. I cut each end of the bar off and split it along the plastic seam to make it thinner. I then continued to cut plastic off until it fit back in the laptop (Note in the picture the magnet has fallen off but I glued it back in later) Replace the Bluetooth board and any screws you removed and reassemble the laptop. The speakers should now work
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