drdominodog51
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- Jan 8, 2025
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Hello all,
My set of Kanto YU6s started having issues with no audio playback around a year ago (out of warranty ofc). I verified this issue was present with and without using an external dac. As the speakers themselves would still illuminate as if they were on, I assume the internal amp died. From what I've read around the internet, this and internal power supply failures seem to be relatively common on these speakers.
Today, I finally got around to converting my Kanto YU6s to passive speakers. I couldn't find any documentation on this conversion anywhere besides people saying the've done it, so I thought I'd post about it here. Tl;dr it's super easy and I'd expect people to be able to do this as their first electronics project. This post will probably be boring for most regular ASR readers.
Disclaimer: there is a 120v/240v power supply in the speaker. Don't be stupid and poke around near large capacitors. You shouldn't be anywhere near the power supply for this.
The active (left) speaker already has external speaker wire terminals for the passive right speaker. All you need to do is directly connect that existing speaker wire terminal to the internal speaker wire. I wish I took better photos of this process but I'll try to show the whole process as much as I can.
To open the left channel, take out the 10 screws securing the backplate to the speaker cabinet. After the 10 marked screws are removed, the backplate will come out with some effort. Removing any non-circled screws will do nothing so don't waste your time like I did.
Once the backplate starts to pull out, there will be some connectors holding the backplate & circuit boards to the main cabinet. Disconnect all of those and you should be left with something similar to what's shown in these two photos. Note, the yellow circled wires had a connector (similar to the circled purple connector in the other photo) before I cut it off and removed the wire.
The yellow-circled cables were connected to a circuit board originally and can easily be found as the only red/black wires in the cabinet half. The cables circled in purple come off the "Right Channel Out" terminals on the backplate and are easy enough to visually trace. To bypass the internal amp and run the speaker as passive, all you need to do is connect the purple circled and yellow circiled wires. Red goes to red/black goes to black. I cut off the existing connectors and just used some electrical tape to make the connections.
When all is said and done, you can use the "right channel out terminals" to connect to an amp of your choosing and keep using the speakers (as shown in the first photo). Sorry for the poor photos, but I just wanted to show how easy this is. Sadly, this has removed any justification I had for upgrading speakers.
Cheers!
My set of Kanto YU6s started having issues with no audio playback around a year ago (out of warranty ofc). I verified this issue was present with and without using an external dac. As the speakers themselves would still illuminate as if they were on, I assume the internal amp died. From what I've read around the internet, this and internal power supply failures seem to be relatively common on these speakers.
Today, I finally got around to converting my Kanto YU6s to passive speakers. I couldn't find any documentation on this conversion anywhere besides people saying the've done it, so I thought I'd post about it here. Tl;dr it's super easy and I'd expect people to be able to do this as their first electronics project. This post will probably be boring for most regular ASR readers.
Disclaimer: there is a 120v/240v power supply in the speaker. Don't be stupid and poke around near large capacitors. You shouldn't be anywhere near the power supply for this.
The active (left) speaker already has external speaker wire terminals for the passive right speaker. All you need to do is directly connect that existing speaker wire terminal to the internal speaker wire. I wish I took better photos of this process but I'll try to show the whole process as much as I can.
To open the left channel, take out the 10 screws securing the backplate to the speaker cabinet. After the 10 marked screws are removed, the backplate will come out with some effort. Removing any non-circled screws will do nothing so don't waste your time like I did.
Once the backplate starts to pull out, there will be some connectors holding the backplate & circuit boards to the main cabinet. Disconnect all of those and you should be left with something similar to what's shown in these two photos. Note, the yellow circled wires had a connector (similar to the circled purple connector in the other photo) before I cut it off and removed the wire.
The yellow-circled cables were connected to a circuit board originally and can easily be found as the only red/black wires in the cabinet half. The cables circled in purple come off the "Right Channel Out" terminals on the backplate and are easy enough to visually trace. To bypass the internal amp and run the speaker as passive, all you need to do is connect the purple circled and yellow circiled wires. Red goes to red/black goes to black. I cut off the existing connectors and just used some electrical tape to make the connections.
When all is said and done, you can use the "right channel out terminals" to connect to an amp of your choosing and keep using the speakers (as shown in the first photo). Sorry for the poor photos, but I just wanted to show how easy this is. Sadly, this has removed any justification I had for upgrading speakers.
Cheers!
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