"Mono" speaker problem

My N7 external speaker has recently turned into a "mono" speaker and is no longer a stereo speaker. Have you ever tried to plug in your headphone jack but didnt get it fully seated? It sorta sounds like that, only one channel is playing. It's most noticeable when I'm playing music that has two guitars that play separately, the music gets really quiet and weird at times, but if I plugin my headphone jack it works fine.

It is not that big of a deal, but I do like to play music through the external speaker occasionally. It's disappointing and I cant decide if I think it is a hardware problem that just all of a sudden popped up, or if 4.2 screwed up something.

i've got this exact problem! It happened to me just last night. I've had my nexus 7 3g for about 4 days now and then this happened.... i've tried restoring factory defaults and even flashing the entire device with the factory ROM to no avail. I've emailed the store I bought it from for an RMA ;-\

there's no fix to this, is there?

To anyone thats wondering, I installed an unofficial phillip defranco app from the play store (youtube front-end with built-in video player). The video stuttered all the time and sounded like crap and then proceeded to crash the device. After the crash, the entire system sounded like it was on one external speaker with drastically reduced volume and very poor sound quality with very noticeable reverb and distortion. My guess is that this is just a defective device, since flashing the software didn't seem to do anything. What confuses me though, is that it seemed to be caused by software to begin with... so what the heck?

Any ideas anyone?