Sony WF-1000XM3 Teardown by 52audio.com

It is always great to see teardowns of new products, especially when they are of Sony’s products. Audio52 performed a full teardown of the new WF-1000XM3 recently, so let us take a look at what they found out.

I will not be posting all of the teardown photos here but only a selection, the rest can be found at the link posted above. The FCC documents, specifically the internal photos, do not reveal much since the photos are low resolution and the charging case was not shown, so no chip details, codes or battery capacity could be revealed. The Audio52 teardown starts with the charging case but I will skip most of that and focus first on the charging case board.

Unfortunately there is no HDX code on the case PCB or anywhere else on the rest of the parts, including the earpods and I just wanted to see the code to compare it to the code from the Bluetooth certification to confirm it. The teardown does provide the battery capacity in more details than just 3.7V that was on the FCC documents, 700mAh/2.59Wh.

A decent capacity and a nice increase from the previous model which had a built in battery of 470mAh/1.739Wh, this is almost 1.5x more capacity. Sony states that charging case can recharge the earbuds up to 3 times, so it seems each time you recharge the earbuds using the case, you use roughly 230mAh, which would mean 115mAh per earbud. I am not entirely sure if that is how it works, maybe some can correct me in the comments.

Now to move onto the earpods themselves. From the photos, it is clear that these are not sealed to any major extent to restrict any water/sweat from entering the interior. There does appear to be a lip on the cover but it seems to be plastic, not rubber, so liquid could still enter the earpods if they are exposed to a significant amount of liquid. I could be wrong and there might be some rubber there but the Google translation feels wrong, so if anyone is able to translate this correctly, 耳机上盖使用卡扣固定, that would be great. The microphone hole is covered on the inside with what appears to be a foam pad to prevent any dust entering, but it would not help with liquid damage. These are not sport headphones and should not be expected to have any significant water/dust resistance but I do hope for users and Sony’s sake, water damage from normal use due to sweat does not become a problem.

Time to dive into the inside of the earpods.

The photo above shows how little space there is inside and how much Sony packed in there. This would limit how many chips Sony could add to the boards and might be one of the reasons why both LDAC and aptX are be missing. Dedicated codec decoders would require space which might be needed for other components like power management, the battery, etc. Sony could have made the battery smaller in order to fit in more chips but reducing battery life would be a bad idea, especially if it was less than the previous model.

While I would have liked to have seen aptX or at least LDAC support, sacrificing battery life or the removing noise cancellation would not be a good trade off. Perhaps in future models Sony might be able to combine some chips together and add in LDAC support, like the NC chip with codec decoders, but I am not an electronics engineer and have no idea if that is even possible.

Anyways, here is the list of most the major chips on the boards:

• Mediatek MT2811SP
• Q128FWY – memory chip
• D3781835 – Sony’s QN1e NC chip
• 310819078266C – unknown
• PK++ – unknown
• E4MW – unknown
• 421E41R9 0RT7G621 – supposedly a battery protection chip
• T260 MbGS
• Mediatek MT6388P – power management chip (under the shield cover)

I am not sure if all of these are correct, I have copied some of the information from the translated article and others from googling them, like the memory chip, but the rest are unknown. If anyone has any actual information what the rest of the chips do, please leave a comment below.