Thinkpad X200 speaker upgrade

I know this may sound silly, but lets be real - the speaker on this machine isn't exactly top of the class. Anyone upgraded it?

I'd guess it wouldn't be expensive to just buy another that sounds good - here I am thinking to whichever Dell used in m11x. Unless its soldered on the motherboard.

 

it is not soldered to the motherboard, but it uses an unique speaker shape and size, so finding another internal speaker like this would be difficult, if not impossible.

I would suggest you get a good quality earphone or a high quality external speaker.

 

I bet this kind of upgrade will beat the m11x-R1 speaker

Laptop Speaker Z305

 

That is sweet! Wonder if it is any good....

Nearly all speakers in laptops suck. Even the JBL speakers in mine are outclassed by a $30 system from Walmart.

 

The X200 speaker is not soldered to the board. It plugs into USB/jack card or whatever it's called. I don't foresee anyone making something better, at least not something you could buy at NewEgg or the like. You might want to check Best Buy or the like. They might sell one. It's a single laptop speaker, it's gonna suck. I didn't think mine was that bad considering.

 

Thanks for the fast replies! I thought hey if its not soldered might as well do the upgrade if I can find something better. And it should be fairly cheap upgrade.... if its possible. I know most laptop speakers suck, its just this one in particular is kind of worse than the average one.

I'll also open up m11x and check out what they have there. I don't wanna take it out permanently (I feel it would be like taking out a kidney) but I'd like to see whether it would fit.

 

"two little rectangles, both pointing down"

m11x, both the R1 and R2 (both of which I had/have, respectively)

 

The speaker may not be so bad, but it's the placement i think caused the low quality. In x200 the speaker is placed beneath right palm rest, and its faced down !.
if you lift up the laptop bottom up, you can actually hear the sound gets louder.

I'm in the process of 'opening' my x200, and really tempted to do something about this,
probably put the speaker somewhere else. Searching thru the forum probably somebode have a good idea.

Just register and this is my first post.

nara,-
.....................
x200 (2009)

 

Get an X200 Ultrabase, maybe? The Ultrabase for the X61s I had, had better speakers. Okay, no phat thumpin', neighbour-scaring rumbles but a bit better.

 

all thinkpad speaker is having similar problem IMO. there's no one care about it. since it's a business notebook. earphone will solve all this thing. but if someone can do some mod on the speaker or transplant to make it better why not?

nowadays all notebook come with jbl, altec, harman kardon,etc. but bear in mind all of them is multimedia notebook. not business notebook.

 

The Ultrabase for the X200 uses larger stereo speakers with some(IIRC) passive channels in it. It gets about as loud as my T500(if not a little louder) when on the base.

Other than that, your only real bet is to use third-party external speakers or a set of nice headphones. For portability, I use a set of decent Koss earbuds with the X200, and a fairly nice set of Bose headphones with the T500.

 

I don't have the laptop anymore but.. with some modding I managed to squeeze in one of the m11x speakers inside. I found a spot where the WWAN card is supposed to be I guess (right next to WiFi card). It had a different connector so I took the one from the X200 speaker. It turned out to be bit better but there was some signal distortion on near-to-max sound levels.

The placement is pretty bad, in both cases. X200t has stereo speakers, but marginally better than the stock ones on X200 (but better nevertheless!). Speakers on the ultrabase (I bought that too) offer some improvement but nothing that spectacular.

I mostly use external speakers in the office when I am alone and earphones if there's other people there.

 

I've found that simply having my hands on the keyboard (specifically my right hand if I'm just using the TrackPoint) will muffle some of the sound because of the speaker placement. If I move my hand out of the way, the sound gets louder. It also makes music listening/YouTube watching with the x200 in my lap very difficult because my lap mutes most of the sound. This is partially why I always have headphones when I take the x200 out with me.

 

Keep the earphone when theres someone in the office, but definately get some kind of proper external speaker for when noone is around. E.g. Laptop Speaker Z305