My future on Patreon (Patreon)

With the current situation, increasing prices everywhere, continuously dropping off supporters on Patreon, close to no income from Youtube, no affilate shares etc, my future on Patreon is quite unsure right now as I can hardly maintain my financial autonomy relying solely on the support I am getting from you on Patreon. Therefore I need to ask myself if it makes any sense to continue and if yes in which way I should continue to still remain interesting for you as everyone will be interested in different topics. Some may be more into blutooth speaker stuff, while others more into headphones etc. I am getting older and my ears are not the youngest anymore, therefore I am not sure how long I can keep this up assuring the best quality.

Honestly I don't think that the bluetooth speaker market is still that exciting like it was several years ago. It doesn't seem to me that we can excpect any real revolutions, just incremental versions of the same speaker every year from JBL, Harman Kardon etc... The really serious brands like VIFA are dead, Devialet could also be interesting with the Mania, but I just cannot afford buying one at this moment as my financial resources are very limited right now, that's why I can hardly afford buying any new gear for reviews and tests. At the same time I cannot expect companies to send me review samples as this would alwys introduce some bias, although I nevertheless tried to remain as honest and direct as possible with my review for the Meze 109 Pro which I got from them for free and immediately sold it right after they told me I could keep it.

Headphones seem to have the same issue: new and new headphone releases, being praised as being the new reference, while still sounding off. Something I just cannot understand, but obviously the market needs to be kept alive somehow fooling customers repeatedly.

Now that I recently managed to improve my entire recording chain significantly, resulting in both a more neutral recording and a more neutral headphone target, allowing me to prepare sound samples of all kinds of sounds including speakers and headphones in the most realistic degree I would definitely like to get more into headphones again as I was actually suprised on my own how realistic the recorded headphones sounded compared to the real one from my recent videos with my current setup. I still have lots of headphones at home that I never reviewed at the same time I would like to offer sound profiles for these headphones bringing them closer to my new neutral target and finally selling them or giving them away, as I don't need all these headphones being worth some thousand dollars which I wasted and simply need this money now. Now that Qudelix 5K supports up to 20 bands of PEQs with the recent update, there is way more freedom for corrections especially for crappy sounding headphones out of the box.

The plan would be to offer an own EQ profile for a particular headphone every month announcing before which headphone I am going to choose next. For those having subscribed to the enthusiast level, they will basically get every profile as long as they subscribed, but after the current month these profiles will be taken off Patreon and will be only availabe as separate purchases priced higher. Thus those not supporting me on Patreon on a regular basis can still get a particular headphone profile they are interested in by simply purchasing it separately albeit more expensive, this way I would like to bind my supporters to stay on Patreon. As I do not see any likelihood to be able to work on some "own" product or collaborate on some product with a real company, this is the only thing I can offer: trying to make exisiting headphones sound better. I would also like to include my possible sound improvements in upcoming reviews, showing how the sound could change with my profile. Those interested can either join Patreon or get the profile separately like mentioned.

I would like to start with a pretty cheap headphone from Superlux which I purchased recently and which actually is pretty decent out of the box given the price, but with my EQ applied it could become not only a reference headphone to playback my sound samples correctly but improving the sound in general. I also need to get more feedback on how well my corrections may work for others to maybe generalise them even more. Only when I personally think a particular headphone really can sound great after my tweaks and makes me want to listen to it, I can be satisfied. Therefore please understand that creating an own profile for a headphone can take some time and hours of listening and improving to get rid of all errors that may be still there but hidden within the response somehow. It will always be an approxiation, sound perception is not an exact science unfortunately. Thus 2 equal looking frequency responses can still sound different.

Of course my biggest goal would be to transfer my current target over onto IEMs and include it as an own EQ for the Free Pro 2 or other IEMs which allow for fully parametric user EQs. I solely use IEMs on the go therefore this will remain my main listening gear and I want it to sound as correct and good as possible. But due to the lack of a professional measuring system which would allow me to measure both headphones and IEMs with exactly the same device to get comparable graphs it is way harder to achieve the same exact result just by listening. Funnily an IEM is a way better base to get a clean sound onto your eardrum than a headphone as the entire interaction with your pinna that you get from headphones resulting in lots of false peaks is completely missing from an IEM. You end up with a way smoother overall response, which only needs to be optimised for your ear canal response together with some generalised simulation of your pinna influence. This already seemed to work pretty well with my current Free Pro 2 tunings not only for me but also for others according to the feedback I ggot, just that the overall balance of IEM target needs to be corrected towards my recent findings and fine tuned.

Other ideas for future content would be to visit people who want to show off their audio gear or asking hifi-stores to set up particular speaker modles and performing sound samples there. This way different rooms, speakers etc could be directly compared to each other maybe even creating a wall of fame for the best sounding listening room/speaker setup. I would like to select some representative audio tracks to be always used for all demos like that and maybe set up a simple database with all these recordings like I already did on Youtube. But this time with a way more faithful recording technique.

I also thought about offering a custom tuning service for those interested so that people could visit me, we would perform some measurements of their ears with a speaker and headphone and I could fine tune my existing target towards their particular ear just like I did with mine. This data could be also used for further averaging and getting a more valid generalised target among most listeners etc. But this is quite complex and demands lots of time as well as a reproducible workflow. I could imagine somethin like that for the snake oil tier for example with either inviting people to my location or visting them, but this would hardly compensate the time and effort needed.

With so much money being made with snakeoil in the audiophile business, this is the only way I think I can still remain active in this scene somehow and I finally need to care about my future and charge some amount for my work which hopefully is valuable for others too.

I would like to know from you which topics you are mostly interested in and why you joined in the first place. I would also like to see how the current distribution changed compared to last time I asked the same. Please select what you are mostly interested in and what kind of content you would like to see more in future.

I would again want to thank all those who stayed here with my since the very beginning, without you I wouldn't have been where I am now! You are my real friends!