Happy new 2022 (Patreon)

Thanks a lot to all of you for your continued support throughout this year and let me give you some idea about my plans of what to expect for next year.

I am currently on holidays and will be back on 2nd week of January. After my return I want to prepare a more detailed tutorial covering the EQ settings used for all “smooth tunings”, what to adjust to get the desired effects as I cannot predict how others may perceive the settings which I tailored towards my own ear. I would also like to prepare further tunings for the Free Pro 2 and start with a tuning strictly towards Harman optimised for all resonance frequencies, although I personally hear it worse sounding it may be favoured by many others. I would also like to extend my current “smooth tunings” for resonance frequencies that I didn’t even consider doing as I was not aware of the wide distribution of ear canal resonances. Thus if your ear resonance is beyond the provided values please send me a message and I will try to cover those extremes as well if I manage to set up a measurements with those values.

I would also like to create a HD800S type of sound for the Free Pro 2 coming next and with every new tuning you would basically get a new headphone “for free”, I also thought about preparing a tuning based on Etymotic’s sound profile and some more sounded tuning profiles not having any neutral reference target in mind, just trying to make the sound appealing.

I am currently evaluating an IEM sample as potential candidate for market release:

Although it would be a very simple product without any fancy functions like ANC etc. it is very small (original product name is “Petit”) and nearly disappears within the ear I also want the housing to be transparent to emphasise the “crystal clear” sound. I have finished a first tuning for it which I like a lot, sounds a bit more mainstream than what I did for the Free Pro and Free Pro 2, but it will be hard to compete against all the cheap offerings from Anker, Earfun not even talking about all the noname stuff flooding the IEM market. I want a high quality sound to be the main selling point compared to the competition which just doesn’t seem to care about sound at all. I probably won’t be able to cover all possible ear canal lengths and thought about a combination of different tips with switchable tunings to offer a decent sound for most, but it will come down to how much interest I can really attract to afford the production costs, because in reality I won’t offer you anything “new” compared to the Earfun Free Pro which hardware wise is definitely superior. I am not a salesman but rather interested in affordable quality sound for everyone.

I am also in contact with an ODM factory about a wireless over ear headphone which can be build after my template and specifications with me having the final word on design, features, tuning etc. As R&D costs will be high it will also depend on how successful I will manage to continue with what I am doing now and if financing of such a product could be realised at all.

Another goal would be to start a completely new audio database like I already did before capturing various audio devices in the most realistic way (I mean scientifically correct and maybe more valid than most measurements published). That would imply that everyone is using the same monitoring system to guarantee that you are really hearing what I was hearing and recording. This already works quite well for my current binaural recordings which should sound “correct” to you (or very close to the real thing) when listened over a “flat” headphone (with flat I am referring to a headphone which is equalised to the “Optimum Hi-Fi” target. Some headphones following this target quite closely even without an additional EQ: HD600, HD650, Focal Elex etc. and in the meantime I can also add the Earfun Free Pro 2 with my current tuning to this list. I also want to optimise my recordings even more to get an even more realistic result when listened over the Free Pro 2 although it’s already very close and especially imaging appears more true to me than from an over ear. I noticed this particularly with my last outdoor video with the Bose Soundlink Flex and JBL Flip 6 where I could really hear the speakers playing from behind my back and even turned around. The deviation of the recording to the “real thing” will be much less when listened over a flat tuned Earfun Free 2 than from most other headphones and I want to expand this onto my new microphones that I should get during the next weeks. I have several pairs of custom built microphones with different designs for different purposes on arrival which will again require some time to get the desired quality with lots of listening sessions.

The work I invested lately into my own neutral IEM target should finally also allow me to capture IEMs with a way more precise degree compared to the MiniDSP I used so far where everything was just an approximation not to mention the lack of consistency for the MiniDSP.

Just like I use the equalised HD600 for self referencing with my binaural recordings I will use the Earfun Free Pro with my latest tuning for self referencing all my IEM recordings done with the couplers. Even if my target may be still off in various areas, it is nevertheless way better than anything else I know which would represent “neutral” in a better sense. This means if you use the Earfun Free Pro 2 with your EQ profile to monitor these recordings, you should get a very close idea about the sound of the recorded IEM. But this also means that a recording of the Earfun will basically sound like the original recording, because the Earfun Free Pro 2 needs to reproduce itself without coloration, that’s the idea behind self-referencing.

Once we settled all for the same monitoring system, we will need to talk about what kind of sample tracks I shall include for the database.

Of course I can only do all this thanks to my Patrons. This is my only source of income right now. I am not sponsored by any company like Sennheiser offering me half a dozen of headphones for giveaways because I am not the right person for any kind of sponsorship, I am not interested in promoting any products that I wouldn’t even consider buying.

On top of this once I managed to optimise my upcoming microphone setup I have plans for some larger videos comparing all Sennheiser headphones that I own like HD560S, HD600, HD650, HD660S together with a comparison of some Beyerdynamic headphones like DT770, DT880, DT990…

I wish everyone the best, good luck and health for the upcoming year and hope to see you again here so that we can explore all the myths of the audiophile world out there together!

Yours, O.