Simple Cable Management & Some Updates (Patreon)

Hey everyone!

This one will be a written post + a simple video. The video is just a simple cable management video. If you like seeing messy things become clean, you'll like it. The writing will share some behind-the-scenes updates I've been working on.

GN Extras

First up: We just published a public video on GN Extras about some of our advertising standards and general transparency information. I think you might like it, but the plan that we didn't mention there is to continue doing this. We can't do a video showing the process for every single ad product that comes through (just because of time -- we're a small team), but we will be doing more of those types of videos for things that we run ads against.

I really like having the GN Extras channel in general. YouTube is a beast to deal with -- there are things that would fly on GN main when it was smaller and all viewers were core audience viewers, but they'd just suffer there now. Interestingly, not even core audience viewers will see it if it's underperforming. YouTube will run content against some percentage of the audience, see lower interest (because maybe it's just a quick 'hey, we were transparent about choosing this PSU'), and then determine that probably no one wants to see the video and stop cycling it. That means even core viewers don't get exposed to the video, and that's where the secondary channel comes in. It'll also allow us to be a lot looser on our production standards to just get more fun or quick stuff out there. It'll still have good info, but we won't edit as heavily. It should feel, in some ways, like a "GN Classic." Not up to our modern standards, but fun for people who already like our stuff.

Test Equipment Updates

That strategy aside, we're also making good progress on the testing operation in the lab. I just got the noise chamber up and running last night. Thus far, we're seeing a noise floor in our chamber of about 10.5dBA to 11.0dBA. This is INSANE, because our old noise floor was closer to ~27dBA (depending). This gives us a lot more room to scale our capabilities and better account for quieter products, but also it allows us to more accurately record noise samples to look at frequency spectrum of the product and determine if it exists within the "annoying" end of the frequency range. I'm excited about that, as that's a new area of testing for us.

The chamber is functional, at this point. It was the last piece holding me up on really running fans through, because I needed noise-normalized data. We'll now have that. Patrick (Lathan) and I have to build a fully passive system so that there isn't any possibility of even a faint fan noise in the room impacting the reading. I hope that lowers the noise floor slightly more, but I'm not sure if it will. I'd be thrilled with a 10.0 to 10.4dBA floor. Thus far, we are far and away exceeding our expectations. I never thought we'd get below 19dBA without a more advanced room-scale chamber.

We'll be filming the passive system build on Monday, so that'll set us up to get the chamber running. Some furniture, like a rolling table, will arrive later this week and give us finishing touches.

There's more going on as well, but a lot of it is day-to-day stuff. We're currently using Unreal Engine 5 to mock-up some set design + storage mixed use areas in the office. One idea is to set up a distant vanishing point / deep shot with just cases on shelves in the background. It'd look cool for case reviews, but would also be highly functional. It'd get the cases of the ground, too. More on that soon.

Thanks for all your support! Having Patreon here has helped stabilize massively against the moving costs, furniture and equipment costs, and bringing our only part-time member up to full-time.

Thank you!