Newsweek 3/2024 (Patreon)

I’ve been quite busy lately with lots of different stuff also not quite Patreon related. My wife is trying to set up her own business now and I am helping her as much as I can with my online skills. I hardly manage to pay my bills with my current income despite the support from you, YouTube managed to demonetise nearly all my videos, thus I am wasting my time on YouTube by still creating public videos. For this reason I started YouTube membership and will upload all Patreon videos also on YouTube. For my existing Patrons there is no need to become member on my channel but for those who cannot or don’t want to use Patreon, they can become members of my channel and watch all my non public videos there, although because of copyright issues most videos seem to get blocked in several areas (I assume Russia, Korea etc)

Unfortunately everything became very expensive recently and we need to find ways how to survive so I hope my wife can find her own way with her business and I need to support her right now.

I am still trying hard to offer you regular content and aside from the go+play 3 I also purchased the new Soundcore Boom 2 which I will try to cover next before returning the Xtreme 4 again.

First impression about the Boom 2 is promising indeed but it cannot really compete with the JBL overall, although the Xtreme 4 already reduces lots of bass at high levels, it’s still more punchy and also louder than the Boom 2. The Boom 2 loses bass at low levels too, just like the old models. For low levels even with bass boosted to maximum it still sounds somehow thin and unimpressive and just starts coming alive below half volume. I will try to shoot some videos with it soon.

I also have some people who had ordered a custom tuned Earfun Free Pro 2 but I underestimated the necessary work to get decent results from all the different units. It’s not enough to match 2 graphs to each other but it needs careful listening to discover issues despite 2 measurements looking the same. Therefore I would beg those who ordered to remain patient and give me some further time to achieve those results I am usually after and that I managed for my own unit. I am quite satisfied with the result I got from my Free Pro 2 and I refined my setting to bring it closer to my overear target although I still didn’t manage to make them sound equal. Meanwhile I even doubt that it’s possible to make an inear sound exactly the same as an overear, despite measuring quite similar there are differences in sound which are hard to detect and explain. I will also continue creating EQs for other headphones maybe I can start my work for the HD6XX im April but right now I simply don’t have any spare minute for this.

I think it’s impossible to become successful financially without having “an own product” on the market with people complaining about having to pay for an EQ… and although I cannot design any inear or headphone from scratch I am in discussion with different companies about some possible collaboration. So far Moondrop was promising and we were already talking about an upcoming product a bit more in detail. I am also in contact with Apos Audio who definitely have more resources than me to release some own product and I would take over the tuning and programming in case they really decide to collaborate with me.

Just to let you know: the new Earfun Wave Pro headphone was released without me being involved at all. I had talked to Earfun already years ago to release something decent together but they preferred to make their own thing apparently. I cannot say how good or bad it sounds as I have not heard it yet but I wouldn’t have high hopes as I already had to help them with the tuning for the old Wave years back and never got any penny for this.

Earfun is also going to release the new U Boom X and I may get involved into creating an own setting for this again but it’s still unsure and I need to hear the raw sample first in order to decide if I am interested at all as it needs to compete against speakers like the Stormbox Blast which may be quite hard.

That was all my recent news I have for you. I hope to be able to support you in some way or other as long as you also support me. Always send me a private message if you need something urgently as here I will usually answer first.

I wish you a great time and wanted to thank again all my long-term supporters. Yours, O.