Joy & Oluv'Sone speaker - official announcement (Patreon)

I wanted to wait with any official announcement of a possible own portable speaker until I wasn't sure that the product I was going to release under my own name can really become something special and can somehow stand out of the crowded portable speaker market. With so many portable speaker releases not only from renowned popular brands like JBL, Bose, Sony, SoundCore... (just to name a few), not even mentioning all the other Chinese crap thrown out every couple of days, in reality there is still no portable speaker on the market that I could call "best in its class", or that has this "something", like the VIFA Helsinki, or Denon Envaya had, when they were released.

Most portable speakers released nowadays seem to pursue weird goals instead of concentrating on pure sound quality, come with some useless features, boomy bass boosts, peaky treble etc. My goal was rather to create a natural sound that makes you immediately want to listen to music without having the impression as if something was missing and without the emphasis of any particular frequency range but to keep the sound honest and pure. Every room or speaker placement will have a huge affect on the final sound of a speaker, therefore the only way to keep the sound as uncoloured as possible is to stay close to neutral to avoid droning or boominess due to excessive bass boosts etc. I invested lots of time and have a result now which I am pretty satisfied with and which hopefully will also satisfy more demanding audiophiles.

Currently I am still refining the sound and some details, but I have already a result which is maybe the best tuning I have achieved so far for a speaker since the Uboom L and Uboom X. I will post some first sound demos soon, but first let me introduce the speaker itself, which as such is nothing special.

It's a 2-way design with a racetrack woofer and a tweeter and 2 opposing passive radiators, basically a JBL Flip 7 design, although the enclosure is slightly bigger than the JBL but smaller than the Uboom L it can still play down to around 45hz without any bass-boost. It has deeper bass response than the JBL Charge 6 of course at reasonable levels only, and it won't be able to retain this bass up to maximum, but even at high levels you will get rests of this deep bass as the passive radiators are tuned rather low and contribute most to the bass at these frequency ranges.

Although the speaker is mono it somehow manages a nicely open and 3d-kind of sound and from some listening distance you will hardly notice its mono character compared to a Uboom L for example, but the dispersion is much broader and the sound is smoother and more detailed at the same time.

There are different ways of possible placement, depending on the situation or room, you can either place it upright, with the tweeter being on top, the woofer at the bottom similar to a bookshelf-speaker. You can place it horizontally facing towards you, like a Uboom L. I would suggest these placements if the speaker is standing rather free at the edge of some surface, but you can also place it laying flat with the drivers firing up which I would suggest if the speaker is placed onto a larger surface or outdoors at the ground. This allows for a more omnidirectional listening similar to the Beoplay A1 but with a more natural sound in the end with deeper and more punchy bass and far less artefacts.

Unlike the Uboom X, which I rather tried to tune as if 2 speaker were playing, this time I took a single Neumann KH80 as rough guide of how a neutral speaker usually would sound in given rooms and placements and used this as target response. As the final response will change if either 1 or 2 speakers are playing, I wanted to tune it more similar to a single monitor, in case you are going to use 2 for stereo you should still get a more natural monitor-like experience.

The tuning I tried to achieve is not 100% neutral. I had to do a compromise between on-axis and off-axis listening, therefore the resulting tuning is slightly brighter on axis, while being less bright than neutral when listening off axis with additional colorations depending on the listening angle. But I tried and am still trying to keep these colorations as natural sounding as possible. As the DSP doesn't allow for real dynamic adjustment I also had to tune the speaker slightly brighter to allow for acceptable low level listening. I tried to keep the bass as flat as possible, although I noticed that the KH80 tend to produce too much upper bass in most placements, I rather kept the range around 200hz flatter. I am quite satisfied with my current tuning, but I am still performing lots of listening tests and continuously do small adjustments to ensure the best possible final result. I want to offer you a unique out of the box experience regardless of placement without the need of additional EQ tweaks or modes etc. It should sound great in a small kitchen and a large room.

So far I was listening against the Uboom L, Uboom X, Motion 300, JBL Charge 6, Flip 6, Beoplay A1, Denon Envaya, Bose Soundlink Flex and I think the new speaker sounds better and more natural than all of these. Please check my podcast for an upcoming audio recording (also accessible for free Patreon members).

Disclaimer: there are still lots of factors that can make this project either succeed or fail. So far it's just a single custom tuning sample that I managed to tune to my liking, I don't even have a real name for the speaker yet. But In order to bring a final product to you, this will also depend a lot on you and how many will be really interested in getting and preordering one. I am not interested in competing with JBL or Bose, they are selling thousands of speakers every month, and releasing new ones every other year. This here will be rather a one of its kind limited to a couple hundred units for real audio enthusiasts who value honest natural sound and are bored of what the current market offers.

The final price will be dependent on many further factors, but I would be stupid if I offered it for much less than those worse sounding models from popular brands that earn millions with their crap. I am definitely planning to offer discounts for my Patrons and also discounts for bundles of 2 speakers or more.

I will keep you updated about any step that brings this project closer to its goal.

Thanks a lot for your support. Maybe I can finally give you something back that no other company managed so far. I can ensure you that they easily could but they rather want to milk you every time again they release something new.

As this is my own personal project and I am not dependent on any company that has tight schedules or profit margins that need to be met, there is nobody that tells me what to do or how to do it, I am doing this mostly out of personal passion and technical interest. It would be of course great if it succeeded as this would for sure allow me to continue with similar projects in future.