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James Whitfield

James Whitfield writes the repair guides on Fix My Speaker. The focus is liquid-damage assessment and acoustic cleaning — specifically, working out which speaker problems are blockage that clears at home and which are hardware faults that need a technician.

What these guides cover

How these guides are written

Claims here fall into three categories and each is handled differently.

Established physics — that diaphragm displacement falls as frequency rises, or that surface tension has a breaking threshold — is stated plainly, because it does not vary by device.

Device-specific detail such as grille layouts, diagnostic dial codes, IP ratings and indicator locations is checked against manufacturer documentation before publication.

Anything that varies, such as a driver's resonant frequency, is described as varying rather than given a single authoritative-sounding number. A great deal of content in this niche states one figure as though it were universal. It is not.

Where popular advice is wrong

Several widely repeated methods do not work, and saying so is more useful than being agreeable:

Naming the limits

Every guide on this site aims to state what it cannot do. Acoustic cleaning addresses liquid and loose debris. It does nothing for oil, earwax, dried sugar, torn diaphragms or broken connections. Several pages here exist mainly to route people away from the tool — the hardware damage guide is the clearest example, and the no-sound page opens by saying the tool will not help.

Corrections

Errors reported through the contact page are fixed on the article itself rather than appended as a note, so what you read is the current version. If something here conflicts with your own bench experience, that is worth hearing — say so and it will be checked.

What this site is not

It is not a repair service, it sells no parts, and it takes no commission on repairs. The tool is free because generating a tone genuinely costs nothing to provide. Where a problem needs a technician, the guides say so and explain what a repair is likely to involve.

Articles by James Whitfield

Background and areas of focus

James Whitfield is a mobile repair technician whose day-to-day work centres on liquid-damage diagnostics — the assessment stage that determines whether a device is recoverable, needs board-level cleaning, or is beyond economical repair. That work involves ultrasonic cleaning of corroded assemblies, speaker and receiver module replacement, charging port repair, and the judgement calls around when a repair is worth quoting at all.

The practical consequence for this site is a bias toward telling people when to stop. A large share of speaker complaints arriving at a repair bench are not speaker faults — they are audio routing, a volume limiter, a screen protector overlapping the earpiece slot, or an equaliser setting. Those cost nothing to check and are worth ruling out before anyone pays for a diagnosis.

Areas covered

Editorial approach

Every guide on this site aims to name its own limits. Acoustic cleaning addresses liquid and loose debris; it does nothing for oil, earwax, dried sugar, torn diaphragms or broken connections. Where the honest answer is "this will not help, see a technician," that is what the page says — several pages here exist mainly to route people away from the tool.

Device-specific claims are checked against manufacturer documentation. Where a figure varies between models, it is described as varying rather than given a single authoritative-sounding number.

Corrections

Errors reported through the contact page are corrected on the article itself. If you are a technician and something here conflicts with your bench experience, that is worth hearing.

See also: more about how these guides are written.