Anyone ever seen a Sony SA-W641? (1 Viewer)

[ColinM]

My boss thinks he knows it all - till I showed him some DIY pics...

Anyway, he has the BEST sub of all - a Sony SA-W641. I would like to see it, but he doesn't have a digicam. He states it is about 18"^3 and 40 lbs, back panel says it consumes 280w.

The problem is it's not working properly, and I like to help people with their problems so I'm trying to find info on it. The model seems valid, as there is a service manual online, but he won't shell out the $20 for it...

He says it's sealed, I say he's lucky then as he can drop in most any driver and it'll work fine. The problem he describes sounds like VC rub.

Anyone with any info?

 

[ColinM]

My boss thinks he knows it all - till I showed him some DIY pics...

Anyway, he has the BEST sub of all - a Sony SA-W641. I would like to see it, but he doesn't have a digicam. He states it is about 18"^3 and 40 lbs, back panel says it consumes 280w.

The problem is it's not working properly, and I like to help people with their problems so I'm trying to find info on it. The model seems valid, as there is a service manual online, but he won't shell out the $20 for it...

He says it's sealed, I say he's lucky then as he can drop in most any driver and it'll work fine. The problem he describes sounds like VC rub.

Anyone with any info?

 

[MikeKaz]

This place will send you a service manual if you think its worth $18.

http://www.treasurechestcorp.com/(et...160&model=w641

 

[MikeKaz]

This place will send you a service manual if you think its worth $18.

http://www.treasurechestcorp.com/(et...160&model=w641

 

[Rory Buszka]

If it IS a sealed box sub, drop in the appropriate Dayton Loudspeakers "Quatro" driver. They work with a wide variety of enclosure alignments.

 

[Rory Buszka]

If it IS a sealed box sub, drop in the appropriate Dayton Loudspeakers "Quatro" driver. They work with a wide variety of enclosure alignments.

 

[Stephen Hopkins]

Using a driver other than the original may not be a good idea considering that the amp probably has equalization custom taylored to that driver/box configuration.

 

[Stephen Hopkins]

Using a driver other than the original may not be a good idea considering that the amp probably has equalization custom taylored to that driver/box configuration.

 

[raving_dingbat]

Greetings from sunny Phoenix AZ:

>>>Anyway, he has the BEST sub of all - a Sony SA-W641.

Funny coincidence! Last week I picked up one of those at ye olde thrift store for extremely cheap, as in $9.00. The grille fabric was torn, the vinyl laminate was scuffed up and the thing looked like it was pretty cheesy even when it was new. It appeared to have been part of a theater-in-a-box system that some yuppie paid a little too much for, then subjected to the floor-level abuses of kids and dogs for about eight or ten years.

Upon arrival home, I pulled off the rear cover, initially with the intention of snatching transistors, electrolytic caps and whatever else might be worth saving. However, before I started cannibalizing, I noticed that the power supply transformer was really substantial. Like something you'd see in a fairly high-end receiver. Likewise, the heat sinks were nothing to sneeze at.

So, out of curiosity, I plugged it in and stuck a phono end into the "subwoofer input". Touched the other end. Big loud 60-Hz hum. OK, so the thing works. Who cares. I was still ready to start plucking parts, as I already have what I thought is a far better woofulator, and regardless of whether it works it's still cheesy and ugly... but I decided, out of compassion for pitiful about-to-be-euthanized electronics, to give it yet another chance. Dragged it into the house, plugged into sub output of my receiver. Played an MP3 with some good bass. The next impression was as follows: "Damn, this old beat-up piece of dumpster-fodder sounds a lot nicer than it looks!"

Dragged it back out into the workshop. Took the front apart - mostly a matter of wood screws and hot-glued plastic locating pins. No driver visible, just a port. Well, OK, so it's a bandpass enclosure. Big deal. Still looks like cheap crap.

Opened the access panel on the front. Pulled out the little medium-compliance 8" driver. Not too bad, actually. Light, stiff cone, foam surround in good shape, decent magnet structure, plus a field-canceling magnet glued to the back. Good thing it's in serviceable condition, because it looks like a hard-to-find item, and we all know this kind of box is highly intolerant of driver spec deviations, what with all that gobbledygook about free-air resonance, Thiele-Small equations, etc. Ow. I get headaches when I think about that stuff.

Anyway, that's when I noticed... another port. Inside the driver chamber, facing out into the second chamber. Twice the length of the port on the front. With anti-whoof flanges at both ends. "Holy crap," I thought, "this is a second-order bandpass enclosure, and a pretty thoroughly engineered one at that!" No wonder it sounds halfway decent. And I'm not even a ported-speaker kinda guy.

The amp part is sort of OK - big power supply, but it uses those STK hybrids instead of discrete transistors, which may be OK, depending on how they're set up for temp compensation, etc... but at any rate, the box and driver turned out to be a real sleeper. So now the ugly thing is on the bench, having already had excess wood cut away (the recessed part where the amp used to be). It will get painted black, the unsupported expanse of too-thin backside will get an extra 3/4" of MDF glued and screwed, the cheap plastic grille form will get re-upholstered with something suitably transparent and the whole mess will be directly connected to one unused channel of a stereo amp that was driving only one sub prior to this.

So yeah, it looks like a crappy consumer thing on the outside, and it is made of low-grade particle board, but underneath that cheapness there seems to be some pretty fancy engineering that might be capable of < 30 Hz, even with such a small driver.

I'll have given this box a more thorough thrashing in a few weeks, and then we'll know for sure whether it was really worth nine clams.

-ed