"SORRY. YOUR DEVICE IS NOT CONNECTED TO THE INTERNET. PLEASE CHECK YOUR BLUETOOTH SETTINGS AND TRY AGAIN." (at max volume!)
It's unbelievable. I'm not an EE, but would love to know how I can disable these incredible unsmart features.
If you go that route you don't really need much EE knowledge.
(This is also only if you already have this box and want to reuse it. Otherwise I would just go to your next neighborhood garage sale and pick up some good speakers for $10)
If you want to understand the whole thing in depth, then yes, I guess so. However, at the end it just links to the already made project published at MIT license that you can simply replicate with barely any knowledge. It's an equivalent of self-compiling a software project after checking out its repo, which sure, may seem overwhelming if you never did that before, but ultimately it boils down to some reading comprehension and step following exercise.
I would not assign this to someone as their first electronics project. They would have to order all the components and get the PCB etched themselves. There's a fair bit of soldering, and a usable soldering iron is not cheap. And there's no undo button in hardware: if you solder something in backwards and pop it, you get pay for a new component and wait for it to ship to you.
The hardest part will be ordering the components, or more specifically verifying that you got them right, as the KiCad project does not include a BOM. Other than that, it's as easy as it gets. Entry-level workshop stuff, about as complex as ArduTouch. People who never held a soldering iron in their life successfully learn on this kind of boards.
(and if you're willing to spare a few more bucks you could even get it assembled by a PCB fab and just receive ready-made boards in your mailbox - the prices aren't prohibitive there either)
I am an EE, so let me tell you.
Use a hammer.
Now we have the answer.
...with the risk that you may get "THE BLUETOOTH DEVICE IS READY TO PAIR" instead, although others have figured out how to replace the prompt sounds on some series such as the JieLi SoCs.
And now I wish HN had spoiler tags and a culture of using them along with trigger warnings...