Fixing the Pathetically Quiet Internal Speaker on a Lenovo M73

That Lenovo M73 I put together a while back actually has an internal speaker — a little 2-pin thing, supposedly 1W or thereabouts. Which means it sounds like a mosquito whining, crackles on top of it, and can’t even do the one job it exists for: pinging me about a new Discord message.

So the obvious fix is to just replace the damn thing.

You can find M73 speakers on Taobao, and I tried one — genuine or not, the sound is equally pitiful. So go bigger: I found an 8-ohm 2W speaker for about 5 yuan. Cheap, and it shows up decently chunky.

Swapping it is dead simple — pull the old one, plug in the new one, the connector is standard. Unfortunately the original mounting holes no longer line up, so I just taped it down with double-sided tape. Held in place is held in place.

The end result comes down to two points:

• It’s genuinely loud. As a Discord notification sound, it absolutely does the job now.
• The audio quality is still terrible. Don’t even think about listening to music on it — the speaker has no real resonance design, so notification duty is all it’s good for.

Still, for 5 yuan on a machine like the M73, that’s a solid deal.