50:50 (Patreon)

I wanted to give you some update about the status of the sEARius, as some have already asked how it was proceeding.

Unfortunately I have some sad news as for now: there is a 50:50 chance that the sEARius won’t be released at all and I will abandon the project again because so far I am not satisfied with the quality of the samples and don’t want to take the risk to release some crappy product.

After receiving the new passive radiator units and mounting them to the new samples the performance in fact improved, but the new units still do not perform like my initial units. The new units have a slightly different response and more distortion, which measured nearfield between driver and passive radiator is about 10% at 50hz for my original units while 35% for the new units.

Aside of the passive radiators the drivers in the new units are also different despite being claimed to be the same as you can clearly see that the cones also look different.

With the passive radiators removed measuring the raw response of just the drivers you can clearly see that the overall response differs quite a bit and even the driver resonance shifted down from 15khz to below 10khz for the new ones.

The measured response of the drivers after tuning becomes most obvious above 100hz,

but the biggest difference is that the new drivers simply cannot be pushed as much with bass which results in a more distorted sound, I would need to reduce overall bass by more than 3dB to get a comparably clean sound but this would make the sEARius sound much worse.

I just sent my reference unit back to the factory for further analysis and was promised to get exactly the same performance for the final units but honestly I am quite sceptical about this, because the drivers are manufactured in another factory which seems to rather produce random results. This may not be that critical for average speakers but as I tuned the sEARius close to the limit of what the driver can handle, the driver is the limiting factor here, and it would only work if all drivers perform exactly the same.

Because of all this I am willing to drop this project again as for now and am sorry to have bothered you with this. I am just waiting to check how the upcoming samples I will receive may perform, only by then I can finally be sure if it is doable or not. Right now I cannot say when this will happen and how long it will take to receive any new samples again. I will keep you updated and inform you about the final decision as soon as I have some further news.

But for those seeking an alternative, Dominik Reviews has tuned the POCA Pine Beat speaker which should soon get a firmware update with his tunings. I am sure this soaker will perform on a similar level if not even better than the sEARius. Right now only available in the UK Amazon store: https://www.amazon.co.uk/POCA-audio-Bluetooth-Waterproof-Serviceable/dp/B0G4584B4Z