Newsweek 06.24 (Patreon)

First of all I would like to thank all my Patrons especially those who always believed in what I was doing and never dropped their support. You were the ones who made me continue contributing something to the audio community. In reality I got bored with the audio business long ago when I discovered that all audio companies are just trying to maximise their profit and would sell you any shit pretending it to be the best sounding product ever instead of trying to really offer high quality sound to the listener. It’s hard to define “good audio quality” and an average joe could be usually satisfied with some $60 dollar speaker from China. It’s funny that one could buy an Earfun UBoom L for even cheaper and people were still complaining about it and about me promoting it all the time, accusing me of being paid by some noname companies to promote their products attacking me because I criticised JBL’s overpriced tinny mini speakers starting flame wars on Reddit about me although I always demonstrated with my sound samples which was the worse sounding one, they still insisted in their belief accusing me being biased and fake…

Getting the chance to tune my first portable speaker with the UBoom L completely from scratch was an exciting adventure back then, and I really felt finally being able to create something worthy which would hopefully not only satisfy me but maybe also others. How wrong I was. Due to all the bad reviews with people complaining about too little bass, some particular reviewer making fun of the speaker and also of me, Earfun decided to drop my tuning after a while and release the speaker with a more bassy sound. Finally the Earfun app will support the UBoom L and you will be able to either select my original 2 tunings (indoor and outdoor) which you can then switch with the dedicated button or you can select Earfun’s various presets or even use the internal 10-band EQ for your own adjustments. Funnily the new default tuning by Earfun is pretty similar to mine, it does not sound like it did in the previous units. The new batch will already come with the latest firmware installed which you can directly connect to the app. Existing owners can update their speaker manually to the newest firmware the same way they did before, a windows PC is needed to run the updater app though. I will post the links to the updater once everything is finished which should be within the next week. Those still interested in the UBoom L, I will let you know when the new batch will be available for purchase and I will provide you my own personal discount code. I don’t get a penny from sales which didn’t use my code. Therefore people accusing me for taking money from Chinese companies, is just pure bullshit. I have no insight how many units are sold in a month but if I was getting shares from all sold units I would probably have an easy living and wouldn’t need to fight every month to pay my bills.

Nevertheless I am somehow thankful that Earfun asked me again if I had interest in providing my own sound settings for their new bigger UBoom X and although the contract is basically the same like it was for the UBoom L, I felt the need to create something special again. This keeps me alive somehow and gives me sleepless nights and the will to get up in the morning and continue with my work as I am trying to squeeze out what is possible out of the given hardware. I got a setback a couple of days ago when I noticed that the Partybox 100 was not playing with full power because the battery was already drained. This made me frustrated because the next day I got out again and did some listening with a fully charged unit and noticed that what I achieved was far not as “special” as I originally thought. I could still hear some distortion here and there and I couldn’t get rid of this annoying cracking…

Although I had shot several videos these days listening and comparing it doesn’t quite make sense to edit and publish them as they may disappoint people and they do not represent the most recent satus as this changes every day… it may be some nuances only but in reality for me these are huge steps if suddenly an affected track is played clean. So just by chance I discovered a compressor setting today which again gave me some hope as I could squeeze out way more bass at high levels like this than before. I was frustrated that the Tribit always seemed to have some more lower bass but finally I achieved some improvement for the UBoom X managed to make it not only sound cleaner and more bassy but also more powerful. I spent some hours outdoors again to do further adjustments and managed to optimise outdoor insane and boomxxx to the same degree. Outdoor should be the cleanest least pushed setting. It sounds most natural and shouldn’t fall apart at highest levels. I could have pushed it more but I think it should still sound relaxed up to maximum volume which is about similar in loudness to the Stormbox Blast but way more natural amd with a more powerful bass and a better frequency response overall. Insane has more emphasis on bass and treble and reduces upper bass more to really be able to use the speaker at the ground and still get some nice sound. Boomxxx is the most pushed setting with most bass overall and the highest possible loudness. With some tracks the difference in bass to the Partybox becomes negligible with others the Partybox has still the edge but I really managed to come closer, the Tribit is no reference anymore I really want to come as close as possible to the bass power of the Partybox which may sound crackbrained but even my son who always makes fun of me saying the Partybox has more bass had to confess that the Earfun sounds better and with some tracks the Partybox sounded just funny. I would like to get out again immediately and demonstrate you the latest achievements. Aside from bass I tried to keep mids as clean as possible and although sometimes still some cracking may occur with pushed recordings I managed to get it much better under control now. I would just need to spend some other hour or 2 and try to also improve all indoor modes which were not really optimised for high levels yet, neither do I want to push these so much like Boomxxx but I want to keep them as clean as possible and need to adopt my tricks I applied to the outdoor settings. Thus it will still take a bit until I can really say: now I am satisfied and the settings are firmware-ready. I am missing being able to use the speaker normally without PC connection all the time and look forward to show you the progress I made. I am mainly doing this not to disappoint those who believed in me. I already see all the negative comments: not enough bass, too much distortion etc I am no magician but somehow I think this speaker can become really something special but everyone must be aware of the physical limits, I think I am already stretching them a bit.

Next I will post a night listening session of the UBoom X against my KH80 together with the UBoom L, to forget about these outdoor test at maximum volume all the time. But from what I could hear today and all the progress I managed recently I think I should go out with the Partybox again and show off a little bit what I achieved.

Once everything is finished I will try getting other comparable speakers namely the Boombox 3, Soundcore Motion Boom 2 plus etc. And then I will maybe notice that it’s not that special like I thought, who knows!

Thanks again for any support this really helps me to keep on going and I hope those interested and curious about the UBoom X won’t be disappointed.

Cheers, O.