I recently reviewed a Bluetooth Speaker on Amazon and wanted to post some information about it. I did not give the speaker a great review even though it had good sound quality. Below is the review posted on Amazon.
Product: HyperGear Fabrix2 Portable Bluetooth Wireless Speakers
Rating: 3 out 5 stars
Heading: Obnoxiously loud every time it is turned on
The design of the speaker looks very nice and it has good sound quality. I’m not an audiophile so you may think differently if you are. The speaker is very loud, so this would be useful for a large gathering of friends.
Now the bad, I had seen other reviewers comment about it being at high volume when it is turned on. I thought it may be nothing but a minor inconvenience but I soon learned that you don’t want to turn it on if others are sleeping or you do not want to disturb them. People will know when you turn it on. If the speaker respected the last volume setting or just started at a lower volume I could give it additional star(s), but the volume issue is too big of a issue. It is a nice looking and sounding speaker though.
Teardown
I did a teardown of the speaker to see if it was possible to modify the firmware on the speaker to fix the issue with it starting at max volume. Below are some photos from the teardown. There are multiple photos of the same chip or board as I was attempting to read the part numbers on the integrated circuits. I have included all the photos in case someone is interested and one photo works better than another.
Analysis
The IC that I focused on was the one marked AS24C093918-65E4. I could not find anything with that particular part number or any reduction of the marking but I did find some promising posts. One post pointed me to the manufacture, which is Zuhai Jie Li. I searched the site but did not find any reference to any ICs with a similar part number. I assume that the IC may be discontinued. I was able to find the GitHub repository and found some generic information related to the firmware on their ICs. It does appear possible to update the firmware.
I decided not to pursue this any further as all the documentation is in Chinese and I would need to determine how to procure the USB programmer mentioned in the documentation at https://doc.zh-jieli.com/Tools/zh-cn/dev_tools/forced_upgrade/upgrade_and_download.html. While it appeared to be doable to create new firmware and update the HyperGear Bluetooth Speaker, it simply was not worth the effort.
I suspect that HyperGear simply outsourced the development and manufacture of this Bluetooth speaker and the lowest bidder won. They delivered a product that worked but failed to be acceptable by this end-user.
