One Hacker’s Battle To Slightly Improve A Sadistic Sony Headset

One matter you will not read through in evaluations of pricey Sony WH-1000XM3 headphones – if you decide on them, you are likely to discover yourself in a just one-sided abusive romantic relationship. A button press or low-battery notification will make the headphones scream at you, ignoring the real sound quantity of what you are currently listening to. At the time they are discharged, they instantly emit loud noises, lecture you about how the battery is very low, then shut down. Oh, and you just can’t use them as they’re charging – if your voicecall lasts more time than expected, you may well come across oneself staying shouted at and forced to fumble all around with wires, silently pleading for contact participants to wait even though you adjust in excess of to a diverse headset.

[MisterHW] resolved to dig in and figure out how to function all around at the very least some of the shortcomings. In a natural way, the “no cost even though using” restrict looked like very low-hanging fruit, and a hefty usability advancement as well – as well as, he suspected the cost cutoff to be masking sounds problems presently abundant on these headphones. Some agonizing disassembly afterwards, he was inspecting the charger IC , the MP2625, dependable for power management. Its signals were being linked to the MCU making use of via-in-pad – and some pads had to be minimize in 50 % to disconnect the vias.

Nevertheless, the laborious pad chopping and subsequent watchful soldering didn’t change out to be fruitful. Even with exterior regulate of the output inhibition pins, the shutoff nevertheless ongoing – something affected the circuit, no matter whether it was VBUS detection, some other unnoticed through-connected pins on the charger, or sensing on D+/D-. About to operate out of lifestyle pressure for this mod, [MisterHW] included a Qi charging circuit, powering a TP4056 wired in parallel with the MP2625. The mod, dubbed HW-1000XM3, created these headphones all that a lot more trusted and a lot less frustrating – charger and MCU none the wiser.

Now, all that is wanted to cost these headphones is to slap a magnetic charger coil onto them, and it doesn’t interfere with voicecalls as substantially as the screaming and forced shutoffs do. With any luck ,, Sony eventually learns to exam their headphones by acquiring people use them – it’s far from the only gripes with this lineup, right after all. We also hope that the voice notifications will be conquered inevitably – this summertime, we’ve seen a hacker firmware mod a Bluetooth speaker to make the appears far more pleasurable. If your headphones are centered on a somewhat well-known module, repurposing them may well be even much easier than that!

Introducing Sonγ HW-1000XM3 !

– MagSafe Charger help
– lower noise charging during(!) convention phone calls
– the regular USB-C charging that switches them off https://t.co/eqc4xv6lk6 pic.twitter.com/U92b7T3LJO

— Helge Wurst (@MisterHW) December 12, 2022