How to open and repair a Creative T4W Satellite Speaker

Creative T4 Wireless Signature Series

I have been a fan of Creative Labs speakers and headphones since long, more than 15 years now. I was recently very impressed with the Creative T4 Wireless Signature Series 2.1 sound system. Unfortunately, Creative has not launched this model in India, so I decided to get it from USA. I bought this online on Amazon USA for $250 in April 2016. Thanks to my friend @Abhijeet who carried this heavy 10+kg beast all the way from USA to me in Pune, India.

Satellite Speaker

I was the happiest person enjoying its thunderous, crisp and clear sound. After two months of use, one of the satellite speakers, while in use, made a sudden popping sound and stopped working. Now that it had a Creative USA 1 year warranty, it was a big challenge to get it fixed in India. I could still ship the satellite speaker to USA and get a replacement from Creative, but Creative, according to their policy wanted me to ship the whole unit including sub-woofer and satellites! Further they could return it only to a US address. So the shipping would cost me more than the speakers themselves. Forget about the time and headache of all the process. I decided to visit Creative Service Center in Pune India, and I was ready to get this satellite fixed at my own cost. Creative service center had very helpful guys and they said they will try their best. They sent my speakers to the main Creative Service Center in Delhi. However it was returned without fixing saying it was not a model available in India and they can neither fix it nor can offer a replacement. I also tried another option of finding a used Creative T4W or its predecessor Creative T3 in the hope that I could use a satellite from them. I even found one used T3 audio system for resale locally with a guy, but that turned out to be in even worse condition and was useless for me.

Exhausted with all options, I decided to fix it on my own with help of my friend Deepak who runs TheChipMasters, a laptop and hardware repairing business and has more than 15 years of expertise in repairing literally anything in electronics. He was extremely confident that we will be able to fix it, while retaining the original sound quality. The multi-meter showed no connection between two terminals of the speaker. So the guess was the internal wiring to the driver must have been cut or the driver coil itself must have been damaged.

Opening the Satellite Speaker 

The first challenge was opening the Creative Satellite. The satellite has no screws or any locking mechanism whatsoever. I googled a lot with no success. No one had posted about how to open it. We spent quite a lot of time figuring out how we could open it, and finally we did. Creative has designed it so as it cannot be opened without causing any damage to its overall assembly! First we tried to remove the upper and lower metal panels and a 'U' shaped panel at the back of it assuming there might be screws underneath it. These panels are glued hard and were extremely difficult to remove. And we wasted a lot of effort removing those only to find that there were no screws under them!

Before and after removing cloth

As a last option, using a paper cutter blade, we teared down the black cloth surrounding 3 sides of the satellite. That exposed the shiny 4‎Ω audiophile-grade aluminium driver inside with metallic cone.

Screws exposed after removing decorative ring

Then the outer plastic decorative ring around the surround was pulled out by inserting a small screwdriver in the gap. The ring is also glued to the body. Care must be taken to avoid any damage to the driver surround itself. Once the ring was removed, we could finally spot the 4 screws that hold the driver to the satellite body.

The driver taken out

We then unscrewed the driver out. It is a driver with really big magnet as compared to its cone size. No wattage or any kind of specifications are written on the driver. So finding a matching replacement was difficult.

The only option was to fix it.

Driver Components (Taken from ht-audio)

Similar to other drivers the surround and spider are glued to the frame with adhesive. We carefully removed the surround and the spider using various tools and could do that with zero damage to both so as we can reuse the same again. We figured out that the voice coil connection to the connection terminal was broken in a weirdest, almost unreachable place underneath the voice coil former where the spider holds the coil. Deepak, with his finest techniques, was able to reconnect the coil to the connection terminal by soldering a 2mm piece of hair-thin copper wire to close the disconnection gap. Extreme care was taken to do a perfect soldering so as to avoid the join coming out of the thin coil plane. This was the toughest work where a mistake could have caused loss of the whole driver or an imperfection could cause loss of sound quality. We ensured the connectivity between terminals and it was working fine.

The final job was to reassemble the whole thing back. We put the things together using various types of glues (namely - J. V. Flex, Fevikwik, Araldite Rapid). We let it dry overnight. Now the satellite was ready and working awesome with no noticeable loss of audio quality!

Ring created with protective cloth

The final thing was to put back the protective cloth. Since we had teared down the black cloth, the driver now was exposed to dust and a handling mistake could cause a dent in the dust cap. So we simply took a thin metallic ring of same diameter as of the decorative ring, stretched the cloth (same one removed from satellite earlier) along its perimeter and glued using fevikwik. After some finishing work it formed a beautiful strong ring with cloth perfectly stretched along surface. We glued it over to the decorative ring and put back on the satellite driver.

And finally it is fixed!

And finally the satellite was ready! The whole fixing process took 6 to 7 hours of work. It saved a lot of cost and frustration of dealing with customer care, shipping etc. Of course now I have lost the warranty, but who cares!