Months ago my (original) Jawbone Jambox started sounding terrible. My significant other has a tendency to blast music and has blown a few speakers so we immediately decided she broke it. We put the speaker in a drawer and forgot about it. Well now that the weather is nice and we have been spending more time outside. I wanted to see what I could do to get the Jambox working again.
First thing was to figure out exactly what was wrong. I wanted to start off by checking to see if one of the speakers was actually blown.
To get the device open you need to start by removing the rubber from both the top and bottom of the unit. It isn't glued down or anything so carefully slide a credit card or anything thin into the space between the rubber and the grill to pry those pieces off.
The next step is to get the grill off. Start by removing the six screws from the top of the device. On the side with on/off switch you can see the grill seam. At the top and bottom edges of that grill seam are two metal clips that you will need to pry up. I used a very small flathead screwdriver. It is a little out of focus but you can see the bottom clip in this image. Once those clips are free you'll need to slide the grill up a fraction of an inch to release the tabs that run along the bottom edge of the grill.
Once you have the grill off remove the eight long screws from the back of the unit.
Now you should be able to careful pull the front and back pieces from each other. You need to do this very carefully as there are two ribbon cables that run between the two pieces. You do not want to tear either of them.
Yours should look something like this.
I tested the speakers by carefully disconnecting the speaker cable (the twisted red and black wires) and testing them with a multimeter. Both of the speakers were responding to the multimeter so neither were blown (whoops, sorry Elysia).
Next step was to figure out why the device sounded so bad. I noticed that when I had a cable connecting my audio source directly to the Jambox it sounded good. It was only when I was going over bluetooth that I had issues. So I did some googling and found that these devices are know to have an issue with the aux in bypass not letting the bluetooth audio work.
After poking the aux in jack with a small screwdriver I found that the bluetooth sounded almost as good as a hard line cable when I pressed a small metal tab down on the aux in jack. This is the bypass that doesn't work correctly.
I got my soldering gun and soldered a small wire from that tab to a solder spot on the device board right below the tab.
Lastly I put a small piece of electric tape over it for protection.
The wire fixes the bluetooth issues but it does bypass the aux in jack completely so that no longer works. Unfortunate but since I always use this wirelessly it was something I was okay with.
Now just put it back together and you're back in business.