Thread Rating:
  • 0 Vote(s) - 0 Average
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
My Phantom voyage
#41
The game is on. Man vs Phantom!
   
Living room: Kii Three/BXT with Control.
Den: Tannoy Precision 8 iDP with TS112 iDP subwoofer.
In the cupboard, waiting for a sibling: 1st gen. Phantom Silver running DOS1
My Phantom Voyage
Reply
#42
Why the dazzling Vidal Sassoon contraption you may ask? It is actually a plasma gun in disguise. It's hotter than Hekla and more frightening than the spawn of *insert your biggest fear here*. Half of the rest of the tools turned out to be useless removing the dust caps. You might guess which. If not, I'll give you a hint or two. They're blue and made of plastic.

So, back to the disassembling.
As the only instructions I had was a YouTube video made in a busy street in Malaysia, I practiced on the broken speaker. The mute swan was spared. 
The dust caps are glued in place with a generous amount of supreme quality French contact adhesive. In other words, it's a pain in the *insert your favourite body part here* to remove caps without turning them into this
   

Aluminum is a very good heat dissipator and thankfully the whole subwoofer is made of the stuff. When trying to heat the dust caps the woofers was equally hot. Afraid of other glued parts to disintegrate, I used a bit more force than heat to remove the dust from caps. It's important to get the tools as flush as possible to the dust cap while prying it off. If you have too steep an angle you'll might damage the voice coil where it's joined with the woofer. After some elbow grease and a bit of swearing, the dust cap was removed! 
   

Next up was the less taunting job to remove four nuts, two on each side. Please look at the following pictures twice, as I didn't bother to take pictures of both sides. If this makes you confused, please look at the pictures in a mirror the second time around. 
   

   
Living room: Kii Three/BXT with Control.
Den: Tannoy Precision 8 iDP with TS112 iDP subwoofer.
In the cupboard, waiting for a sibling: 1st gen. Phantom Silver running DOS1
My Phantom Voyage
Reply
#43
Excited about the next steps. Thanks for posting it here!
Reply
#44
Indeed, looking forward to follow that journey!

Jean-Marie
MacBook Air M2 -> RAAT/Air -> WiFi -> PLC -> Ethernet -> Devialet 220pro with Core Infinity (upgraded from 120) -> AperturA Armonia
France
Reply
#45
@Bbnsound and @Jean-Marie Thank you popping by! It is nice to know that someone actually reads my monologue.

So, after removing the four nuts it was time to crack the egg wide open. After several attempts with this power tool, I gave up and played some guitar
   

After an hour or so playing the six first notes of "Nothing else matters", I'm a terrible guitar player by the way, a revelation came to me. What if I could finally use this odd guitar tool for something useful? 
   

Energized by the enlightenment I promptly went to work. 
   

Success!
   

A bit of jiggling and suddenly the high gloss egg revealed its inner secrets! 
   

I haven't been so happy since I didn't manage to break my turntable while disassembling it. What a glorious day!
Living room: Kii Three/BXT with Control.
Den: Tannoy Precision 8 iDP with TS112 iDP subwoofer.
In the cupboard, waiting for a sibling: 1st gen. Phantom Silver running DOS1
My Phantom Voyage
Reply
#46
My head is thumping, my throat is sore and I'm full of self pity. As you probably can tell I've caught a severe kind of manflu. While waiting for the test result to confirm that I'm just whining, I will kill some time on the next part of the Phantom dissection.

First, it's time to end the endless discussion of what is best of solid core and multi strand speaker cables. As Devialet is always right, their doing decides. After all they claimed that the Phantom couldn't be repaired.
   

As you can see, Devialet uses two metal rods connecting the woofers to the amp. That's that you might say, but you can see that they use multi strand from the rods to the spider. So the endless quarrel can continue, thankfully. Without quarrels, hifi is dead. 

Metal rods aren't the most flexible things, they might bend or snap if there is applied a bit too much force. To minimise the risk of making a mess of the assembly of the Phantom, Devialet has made guide cups for the metal rods. Quite clever. 
   

Another thing to notice is the washers used to secure an accurate fit of the eggshells. It seems like the number of washers is individually for each speaker. One of the Phantoms had two on each bolt, one had three on a couple of them. A bit of tape, to avoid crawling around on the floor swearing and sweating while looking for invisible washers, is good use of ehhh tape.
   

Voilà. No crawling for me. 
   

I will end this chapter of the Phantom story with a serious warning. 
   
See you on the other side!
Living room: Kii Three/BXT with Control.
Den: Tannoy Precision 8 iDP with TS112 iDP subwoofer.
In the cupboard, waiting for a sibling: 1st gen. Phantom Silver running DOS1
My Phantom Voyage
Reply
#47
Very impressive and not for the faint hearts!

Jean-Marie
MacBook Air M2 -> RAAT/Air -> WiFi -> PLC -> Ethernet -> Devialet 220pro with Core Infinity (upgraded from 120) -> AperturA Armonia
France
Reply
#48
Thanks @ragwo for all these insights. Indeed, precision engineering in the end needs the guy with the hammer that does the last adjustments.
Reply
#49
I've managed to infect my better half with manflu, so now she has the flu. Really strange how the disease changes name and severity when she gets it. For the occasion I've made her a sign.
   
I believe she'll appreciate it. 




Update. 
While I'm lying on the couch in the garage trying to sleep, I'll pass some time continuing the Phantom Slayer Business. 

After the egg split open and revealed its guts, the dissection continued. It involved removing a good handful of non magnetic screws soaked in high quality red French locktite. Thankfully the quality of the screws was downright awful in one of the speakers, and rounded screw heads did emerge more often than I liked. Seems like Devialet had spotted the problem and procured screws of a stronger metal alloy in later production. That, or they skipped the high quality French locktite and used some maple syrup instead. I didn't have any problems with the newest speaker. 
Before me rounding torx screws size a bit too small. 
   

Devialet has been clever enough to use same sized screws all over the place, so the only thing I had to manage was not to lose any, which I didn't. Thankfully the lost ones were found after a bit of crawling around on the floor swearing. 
Here's the heat shield removed. 
   

When the screws were removed and the PCB still seemed to be welded in place, I turned the egg around and kept on losing screws. Before the dissection I hadn't found any instructions on the interweb about disassembling the inner parts of the Phantom, so I didn't know if there was any screw going the whole way through to the other side of the speaker. 
   

After removing the heat shield.
   

After removing all the screws both PCBs still felt like welded to the chassis. What to do?
Living room: Kii Three/BXT with Control.
Den: Tannoy Precision 8 iDP with TS112 iDP subwoofer.
In the cupboard, waiting for a sibling: 1st gen. Phantom Silver running DOS1
My Phantom Voyage
Reply
#50
A wise man once told me; when everything else fails, use brute force. With that in mind, I went to work and tried brute but gently to pry the PCBs loose. The one on the left side wouldn't move at all, so I tried the other side. I started at the back end of the speaker, gently loosening the PCB. 
Success! 
   

As you can see it's a 60 pin connection going through the chassis to the other PCB. Clever Devialet! 
   

The culprit of the mute Phantom was located. No wonder it went silent.
   

In high spirits by the success, I went to work on the left side. The spirits left, and the swearing returned. The PCB was fused to the chassis. I grabbed my unfusing tool seen in the right side of the picture, and within a minute the PCB was loose. Oh glory!
   

No wonder it was hard to get the PCB off the chassis. I haven't seen such an enormous thermal pad since, ehhh never. 

Yet another PCB emerged. What could it be? 
   

Stay tuned!
Living room: Kii Three/BXT with Control.
Den: Tannoy Precision 8 iDP with TS112 iDP subwoofer.
In the cupboard, waiting for a sibling: 1st gen. Phantom Silver running DOS1
My Phantom Voyage
Reply


Forum Jump:


Users browsing this thread: 2 Guest(s)