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Hacking the Sonos IKEA Symfonisk into a High Quality Speaker Amp

makezine.com

11–20 of 49 posts

Re: Hacking the Sonos IKEA Symfonisk into a High Quality Speaker Amp

#11
post #6

What would it take to connect those two outlets to the line ins of a sub / speaker?

You would have to take the line-level signals from before the power amps, and the crossover is probably around 2500-3500Hz, way too high for a subwoofer.

Re: Hacking the Sonos IKEA Symfonisk into a High Quality Speaker Amp

#12
post #2

This is cool! I wonder if you connected just one of the audio outputs to a speaker with a crossover, the system would adjust to put the whole frequency range through it? It may also be that there's somewhere on the pcb you can tap into line level full frequency audio (or maybe not - they could easily do the filtering only in the digital domain) One thing to keep in mind when doing this is the impedance of the speaker…

The description of the tuning app makes it almost certain that the crossover is purely digital, possibly integrated with the codec as well.

Re: Hacking the Sonos IKEA Symfonisk into a High Quality Speaker Amp

#14

Fun fact: the author of this piece, Ben Hobby, is the son of David Hobby, the photographer who maintains Strobing, one of the best blogs on off camera lighting: https://strobist.blogspot.com/?m=1

Really thought this post was going to somehow circle around to Hobby Lobby as I was reading it.

Re: Hacking the Sonos IKEA Symfonisk into a High Quality Speaker Amp

#15

Clever. Don't go frying the amp hooked up to those big towers. :)

IIRC the only way to fry an amp is to hook it up with no load. Putting not enough load will fry the load when the amp overdrives it, putting too much load will simply make for a quiet speaker.

Really dependance on the kind of amp you tot. For older tube amps, this is a major concern indeed because they drive by current, not voltage, thus exploding the voltage when there’s no path for the current to flow. Modern class D amps don’t have this problem, those just hate short circuits as they drive by voltage.

Re: Hacking the Sonos IKEA Symfonisk into a High Quality Speaker Amp

#17
IKEA seem to be killing it in speaker area these days. Even as Swede, that's kind of unexpected. I guess they saw a market segment where a lot of wood is used (this one's plastic though), and there were high margins for the premium products and then decided to go for it.

There's obviously a great deal of outsourcing to chinese and taiwanese manufacturers going on here, but they seem to be very competent in the customer role.

I love my IKEA Eneby BT speaker from last year. (This one, with the add-on battery: https://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/00357636/)

I would love for IKEA to go into the standalone analogue speaker segment with a fantastic living room speaker, just to piss off those (often) European and quite pretentious speaker brands. Take on B&W and the likes!

Re: Hacking the Sonos IKEA Symfonisk into a High Quality Speaker Amp

#18
Most wireless speakers released nowadays have a digital EQ to compensate for differences in frequency response to simulate accuracy. However the fact that this EQ is now being utilized on a different set of speakers makes this build far from "high quality".

Re: Hacking the Sonos IKEA Symfonisk into a High Quality Speaker Amp

#19
post #16

It looks so much of an overkill on the digital side. A fully fledged SoC with PCI Express and standalone WiFi NIC just to do network, and audio decode? Chinese factories make such Internet radios on $2 Espressif or Realtek microcontrollers.

It looks like the processor is doing some form of DSP, so some smarts are required. It can also play from Spotify etc. and the binaries for that are probably bloated like most cloud services.

With this said, had this been a lower end product, the SoC would probably have been an Allwinner or MTK with a soldered Realtek SDIO WiFi solution.

Re: Hacking the Sonos IKEA Symfonisk into a High Quality Speaker Amp

#20
post #4

Quite dangerous to leave this without an enclosure, since the power supply is on the same PCB, several of the components and solder points carry mains voltage. I'm surprised an outlet as high profile as Make don't at least recommend one, or have any of the usual warnings about high voltage. On a side note, it's no mean feat integrating large through hole components and tiny SMD parts onto the one PCB, normally power…

From TFA: "... maybe build yourself a nice enclosure for the electronics ..."
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