Sunday, January 3, 2010

Sony APM X360 Information

Per the last post, the APM X360 appears to not have much depth on the internet.

I have what I'll take to be the middle section, with a downward-firing woofer, square midrange, and a tweeter. There are dowels aiming downward from the bottom (which is open), implying a base, and there are four rubber holes in the top, implying something sitting up there as well...and speaker terminals on the very top of both speakers (which do NOT connect to the internal drivers; must be a chaining to additional components).

The grilles do come off. There are two pins at the top and bottom rear of each side of each speaker. Pinch the grill fabric in and pull at the rear top and bottom and they come off.

There are three drivers in this unit:

-Woofer: Sony 150370711, 6" cone in an 8 3/20ths frame, 16 ohms, 100 watts max.
-Mid: Sony 150370911, 16 ohms, 60 watts maximum.
-Tweeter: Sony 150370811, 8 ohms, 100 watts maximum.

ued.com have listings of these parts. For example, the tweeter:

http://www.ued.net/ued/addItems.do?itemCode=SNY150370811

$25.90 each.

Note that the woofer (nice heavy magnet, but paper cone) is easily replaced with Pyramid WX85X woofers, 100 watts RMS, and I paid around $35.00 for a pair, delivered. Got mine at http://www.crispdeals.com/.

Otherwise, the Sony woofer:

http://www.ued.net/ued/addItems.do?itemCode=SNY150370711

$119.56

By the way, UED are a great source for Japanese circuitry. I've never ordered, but they have listings of many hard-to-find items.

I see that there are no crossovers in these speakers at all, excepting a 2.7uF Nichicon cap on the tweeter (thankfully, an audio-grade capacitor). This looks to be about 5KHz at 6dB/Octave. The midrange and woofer just play on and outward to the ends of their response ranges (which is very good for overall phase response; Irving Fried was finally able to use 6dB crossovers when drivers became available with enough power handling to allow it.).

I had worried about blowing the (full-range) midrange driver...I noted on the internet that the Yamaha NS1000 speakers were sometimes modded with tupperware containers to enclose the rear of the midrange as there had indeed been cases where the woofer action had blown out the mid!

The port noise became tiresome, so in went enough toilet paper to stop it, but not enough to firmly stop the port, or too little to be sucked into the unit during play.

As these speakers are coated in a plastic sheen, I find that warm water made short work of the tape gunk residue covering mine, and did not detract from the finish.