D.I.Y. Apple W1 bluetooth earphones

Beats X launched in November 2018 and I bought it 1 week later at my local Harvey Norman. I hated them. In-ear buds aren't for me, it feels like I'm in a swimming pool whenever I'm using them. I tried all the size tips. There was one awesome redeeming quality though - and that was the W1 bluetooth chip.

Fast forward to December 15 2020, and Apple releases Airpods Max ... for $900 (US $600). I'm pretty sure I'll love these but I also need to eat - and $900 for a pair of headphones is insane. I'd since lost my Beats X earphones but I went and bought a pair of Beats Flex for $79 which are basically the same thing except with a USB-C port instead of a lightning port. Let the modding begin.

What's so spesh about the W1 chip?

Excuse me while my inner Apple fanboy gushes a little. The W1 chip is freaking awesome. Not just for it's Apple-centric instant pair and device sharing features, but because it's range. 30 metres.

That's about 3 times more than my Bose headphones and it means I can leave the room in the middle of a zoom call to grab a glass of water, or answer the door without worrying about drop-outs. Audio quality is sweet too, and yeah the instant pair apple-voodoo stuff solves 95% of bluetooth connection issues.

The plan

The plan is to cut the drivers off the Beats Flex and run the wires to a standard 3.5mm audio jack that's compatible with any pair of wired earphones or headphones. Basically make a W1 powered chip that can plug into any set of cans.

The build

This project should be easy. Cut the drivers off, strip the wires and hook them up to a jack. I've never had such a hard time stripping wires.

The beats flex rubber cables carry a few real and fake wires up to each driver. on the left side there's the ground and speaker wire as well as the wires that power the magnetic pause detection chip. On the right side there's just as many cables but the 3 wires that power the magnetic pause detection chip go nowhere (because there's no chip on that side.

The black rubber cable is moulded around the wires, so in order to take the wires out I had to cut out each cable. Joy.

After that you're left with a set of tiny, tiny, cloth covered wires. How the hell am I meant to strip those. Oh of course, burn them...

The wires left behind are super thin, and in fact I burnt through a couple of them trying to remove the cloth. They definitely didn't build these to be taken apart.

In the photo above, the two faded green cables are the left and right live cables and I've wound both of the grounds up at the top. I'm taping up and ignoring the magnetic sensor cables for this project, don't need them. All we need is the ground and positive speaker wires for each side.

Next step is soldering them to the 3.5mm jack. I bought some of these 3.5mm female jacks on eBay.

It's fiddly work to wire these up with such small cables! I made sure there was plenty of length in the bare wires and did a lot of twisting to get a solid connection before soldering. If you were doing this mod in any permanent way you'd be better off rewiring the entire connection from circuit board to the jack.

I'm not really kitted out for precision soldering so I had to do hack together a setup using a clamp. Definitely some of the most frustrating minutes of my life.

I did an OK job of soldering up the connection, good enough for some testing. The end result ... I present to you ... The Beats Jack...

Beautiful right? How does it sound though?

The Sound

Plugged into the analog port of the Bose QC35's and ... it sounds ... pretty bad. It's clear enough, and I checked all the connections and their solid, but it's like the bass and mids have been boosted to a point where the headphones just sound muddy. Surprisingly there's enough power to drive a full set of headphones, loudness isn't the issue (although they can't get as loud as Bose QC35's usually do) but when I A/B tested them with the Bose QC35's own bluetooth driver it was pretty obvious that the Beats was doing some audio processing that didn't fly.

So what's going on? My guess is that the Beats Flex bluetooth driver is actively processing the audio before it hits the buds to get the most out of those units. So whilst the bluetooth connection is solid, everything works as it should (except the magnetic pause) I'd say this mod was a bit of a bust. But hey, at least I got a blog article out of it?

You can check out a video of this project here: