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Today, we will disassemble Sony’s latest noise cancelling earbuds for everyone.
To be honest, Sony has its own way of naming its product, very unique.
This one is called Sony WF-1000XM4, which is Sony’s flagship earbuds.
After using it for a few days, I found that this pair of earbuds is very good at
audio quality and noise cancellation.
So, let’s go ahead to tear it down and find out the internal design and components.
Open the box.
Except for the earbuds, there is also a thick stack of product manuals in here.
And we can see two additional pairs of ear tips and a charging cable at the bottom.
The outer layer of the ear tips is memory foam, and the middle is silicone.
This design is comfortable to wear and can also reduce high-frequency noise and improve
the sound insulation effect.
The product color we got is silver.
This generation of charging case is already very small.
Compared with the previous generation, XM3, it is 40% smaller, but it lacks the function of NFC pairing.
The wireless charging coil is at the bottom of the charging case, and there is some information.
The input of the charging case is 5V The output of the charging case is 5V, 140mA.
Made in Malaysia.
Open the charging case and take out the earbuds.
There are three pogo pins for earbuds charging.
The two black areas are the space left for the distance sensor.
There is an indicator light on the edge.
After charging case, let’s see the earbuds.
This shape is still very recognizable.
The round shape is slightly bigger than other brands.
The outer area supports touch.
So, it supports multiple gestures and can be customized.
This hole looks like a port, but it’s actually the feedforward microphone with a special
anti-wind noise design.
There is another microphone on the other side.
There are three metal contacts, a distance sensor, and a pressure relief hole on the inside of the earbuds.
Next, let’s do our today’s mission.
Firstly, heating.
Then, use a spudger to slowly pry along the charging case and take out the module.
The motherboard is inside, and the wireless charging coil is outside.
The black tape can prevent light leakage of the charging case, and the case is fixed by plastic clip.
It can be divided into two parts.
There is a black isolation board between the motherboard and the battery.
Remove the isolation board.
There is a connector.
Remove the battery and look at the specification of battery.
It comes from high power tech; the limit voltage is 4.4V.
Its rated voltage is 3.85V, and its rated capacity is 520mAh.
There is a protection board at the end of the battery.
And there is a thermistor on it to detect the battery temperature.
The motherboard of the charging case is fixed to the frame by two screws.
There are two magnets inside the charging case to attract and fix the earbuds and attract the case lid.
Back to the motherboard, the charging contacts are directly soldered on it.
Two of them are used to charge the earbuds.
Another one is used to control the charging.
The largest chip in the middle is the microcontroller of K32 L2B series from NXP Semiconductors,
customized by Sony, with built-in ARM-M0 core.
It can be used for management of charge and discharge module, battery power management,
indicator light control and earbuds communication, etc.
The small strip in here is an LED light.
The Hall element in the corner, which can sense the magnetic field changes when the
charging case lid is opened and closed.
Only in this way, the earbuds can be connected instantly.
Let’s see the other side.
This is an input protection chip.
This one is charging IC, comes from Texas Instruments BQ25618, and is used to charge the battery.
This is 5W wireless power receiver from Renesas Electronics IDT P9222-R.
And then, let’s start to disassemble the earbuds after heating.
Slowly pry to open it.
We can see the inside and outside parts are fixed by BTB connectors.
Let’s firstly look at the circuit of the outside part.
There is a flexible FPC in the middle.
And the call microphone and the feedforward microphone are on two sides.
The black circle on edge is sealant, which can achieve the waterproof and dustproof effect.
Let’s look at the circuit on another side.
The feedback microphone connects to the motherboard through an FPC cable.
The battery is under the middle BTB connector.
At the same time, this FPC also connects to the metal contacts and the distance sensor in here.
Back to the outside part.
There are two microphone holes in here.
Now, let’s see the motherboard.
The largest chip in the middle is the Bluetooth master control of the earbuds from MediaTek MT2822.
It supports Bluetooth 5.2 and Airoha MCSync TWS technology.
It also supports LDAC encoding that supports wireless high-resolution sound quality,
which can help earbuds get Hi-Res Wireless certification.
So, it has those features, like good processing and noise cancellation performance, low power consumption, etc.
The chip on the back is an external memory, model Q128J, used to store firmware information.
Let’s look at the circuit on another side.
The battery is fixed inside by a red plastic bracket.
Take out the battery.
It comes from ZeniPower.
Model is Z55H.
Its rated voltage is 3.85V, and the energy is 0.29Wh.
Remove the pogo pins and take out the PCB.
There are infrared sensor, two elastic metal plates connected to the speakers, and an IC marked with 84.
There is also a waterproof design after taking out the speaker unit.
The infrared sensor filter is in here.
And the circular magnet used to attract the charging case.
This is the new 6mm driver unit promoted by Sony, which has better sound performance in
high, middle and low frequencies.
The unit is enclosed in a semi-sealed mold for waterproofing.
There is a signal cable made with LDS technology to connect the driver unit.
This is a MEMS (micro-electromechanical systems) microphone in here.
Ok, that’s all for our today’s teardown of Sony WF-1000XM4 noise cancelling wireless earbuds.
I have to say that the appearance of this product is unique, and I think the reason
why it’s relatively large than others is that it needs to ensure the transmission of sound quality.
But compared with previous generation, its charging case has become smaller and easier to carry.
Sony XM4 has been optimized and improved in terms of internal structure and audio quality.
As for noise cancellation, the feedforward microphone is on the bottom of the earbuds,
with special anti-wind noise design.
So for this $278 Sony earbuds.
Do you think it’s worthy or not?
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