Fixing up some Creature Speakers

Saturday, July 5, 2025

So recently I wanted a set of these creature speakers for my secondary (work?) desk, because… I mean they’re just so fucking cute, look at them. These are JBL Creature Speakers from the 2000’s, and they can be had pretty cheaply with one caveat: They’re now over 20 years old, and boy did JBL not build these for the long haul. But you know, nobody does, and yet we fix things anyway because pushing back against the tide of inevitable flow of time just makes some of us feel alive.

So, I grabbed a set of these off Mercari. The seller helpfully (and quite honestly) let me know they had aged even further since he had listed them for sale, letting me know that the speaker units within the satelites had now fully deteriorated and they were effectively mute. That said, I had specifically known this was likely, and reassured him that I knew this and my plan was to fix them.

They arrived and taking apart the first (easier) satelite, the left one that has no controls in it; yes indeed, the speakers were gone. I do mean gone too, the paper backing had essentially vanished, leaving the driver just sort of hanging in mid-air. In fact when I opened the box and pulled them out, the magnetic backer of the driver just thudded out onto the bench. Woops!

But yeah with nothing holding that in place, this speakers got nothing more to offer, sadly. Some quick research revealed I needed 40mm 4ohm 5-watt speakers, which you can slam into your online store of choice and get probably a bunch of different results. That said, I am not a patient lady, so I went to the Prime gods and put down an order for these speakers here, which funnily enough are actually called out in the description as Satellite Creature replacements.

I’d give them more credit for this but they also indicated the connectivity tech as Bluetooth and… no.

So, slammed down an order for those and two short days later, fired up a soldering iron. For the left satelite I did a basic swap, including new wiring what with the old ones being wrapped in some kind of foam. Nothing overly complicated here, the speaker terminals should have + and - labeled, as does the PCB for the speaker on the bottom. Arrange accordingly and solder.

Then you reassemble the whole units. This is the fiddliest part by far as you kind of need three hands to do it properly, but once things are where they belong, it all snaps together really well. For my own peace of mind, I did glue the speakers to the plastic frame that fits inside against the outer one before installing, though since the original backers fit well against them, this was probably overkill. Once that’s done you can re-insert the frame in the speaker body, and click the chrome part on the front, which doubles as a retainer for the speaker and it’s frame within. Then you screw in that offset bit and you’re good.

The only issue I had was due to the placement of that capacitor there, reassembly was a bit stiff. I could’ve unglued the speaker and rotated the contacts away from it to address this, but it went together without damaging anything and works fine, so I didn’t bother.

Last step was to connect everything. This was clearly a well loved set of speakers, and by that I mean the cables were… pretty fuckin filthy. That said before I went to that trouble I wanted to make sure they would work, so we plug in everything (including the original power supply!) and I went with my Mac, since I know and trust Apple’s integrated headphone jacks and their associated drivers to be good, and fired it up.

And there we go! I’m not certain why it is these go bad so often… it’s sad to be honest, because I have a different set of speakers, a Creative i-Trigue, from the same era and they’ve aged incredibly gracefully compared to all three sets of Creature’s I’ve had apart now. Some light research suggests it’s mostly an issue of build material quality, which is unfortunate. The i-Trigues weren’t that much more expensive but JBL really cheaped out on them.

In any case, I’ve got them now, and I’m happy. Till next!

- Madison