2019: Our Year In Review

…because…well, this is our story so far and our year in review. Audioreviews.org was established in late February 2019 by Jürgen Kraus with occasional contributions by his (then) neighbour and “Super Best Audio Friend” Biodegraded. Both are PhDs with 30 plus years of experience in scientific analysis and each has a substantial publication record. The blog is run out of Calgary, AB, Canada. Jürgen Kraus is “Otto Motor” on Head-Fi and “Brause” on Super Best Audio Friends.

Jürgen and Biodegraded had blogging experience since 2010, when they established a somewhat subversive blog dealing with climate science. This topic has become obsolete as the world has caught on to the reality of a changing climate so that such basic scientific information has become less relevant. Their blog expired in 2019.

Defining The Idea

Joining Head-Fi in late 2016, Jürgen created lots of fierce enemies right away, including the admins, by criticizing the morass of product reviewing on blogs and Head-Fi as well as product exclusion in favour of Head-Fi sponsors. It became increasingly difficult for him to post his contributions on Head-Fi. Jürgen also noticed the demise of the knowledgeable people from Head-Fi, which makes this forum little relevant for technical information.

When his discontent with the discussion forums climaxed, Jürgen decided to create his own blog. It should not be the usual flashy shopping catalogue that invited impulse buying, but a down-to-the-bone tech blog discussing the technical and practical characteristics of an earphone (and other devices). The main hurdles were (1) to provide interesting content on a regular basis without becoming assembly-line reviewers, (2) not becoming dependent from companies and delivering “honest reviews appeasing the manufacturer in exchange for more product in the future”, (3) not being dependent and yet attracting the attention of manufacturers, and (4) developing original ideas to distinguish audioreviews.org from everybody else to stay interesting.

Setting The Initial Goals

The most important goal was to create credibility, both in terms of technical knowledge and in trust in our integrity. Building technical credibility takes time: it largely depends on the user’s own experience with the iems we reviewed. And in order to appear trustworthy we try to be as transparent as possible, and Jürgen personally reaches out to companies always with the prerogative of returning their review units (at their own expense), particularly the pricier ones.

Coming from Germany, Jürgen has followed independent product reviews by “Stiftung Warentest”, a consumer advice magazine, for all his life. Based on this, the articles in this blog come purely from a consumer advocacy perspective. We aim to minimize consumer’s risk (risk = threat or loss) and therefore buyer’s remorse. We underline our trustworthiness by refraining from any form of generating income (no advertisements, affiliate links) or by leaving the impression, we have something to sell. This creates a steady conflict with sellers/manufacturers, who see reviews as advertisement. Their ultimate goal is obviously to get exposure for their product and sell as much as possible. Favourable reviews help…

In terms of style, we wanted to bring the point across in as few words as possible…and doing this well is very difficult. We want that you, our reader, gets the overview very fast, and then has the choice to dig deeper. And we are still working on this.

The Humble Beginnings

After a rocky blog setup with the hoster, Jürgen transferred all his Head-Fi reviews since May 2018 over…with their original publications dates. He and Biodegraded were instantly joined by two Headfiers (Loomis Johson and Slater). Loomis had some reviews ready from his days with the now defunct “Asian Provocative Ear” blog. And Slater, our hands-on guy, contributed some practical “mods”. And since we were not keen on assembly-line reviews, we initially focused on technical issues such as compiling reversible mods for a good overview.

The blog came fast and loud out of its starting blogs, like a long-awaited IPO, and then settled at a baseline of 100 individual users per day. It stayed there until the summer.

The Weird-Shit Doctrine

Loomis advised to present a generous variety of content to make this blog a “tossed salad”. We introduced our “music picks”, we skipped the unboxing, we separated reviews (technical information) from photo albums (aesthetics, which we labelled “Audio Porn”), we continued our technical article series, and we changed our layout to magazine style in order to distinguish us from the usual shopping catalogue-style (review) blogs. We frequently feature several reviews of the same iem (we send review units around) and review iemswe have purchased ourselves…and we have a sophisticated internal-link system to guide your way to related information. In the end, we give many of the review units away. Jürgen did not stop making enemies by being outspoken…but also many friends. Sometimes it is good to be polarizing. We want to stir the pot…as said: weird shit.

Taking Off

By early summer, we had proudly secured our first big fish, Sennheiser’s IE500 PRO, as one of the first reviewers. Unfortunately, Biodegraded and Jürgen found fundamental flaws in the product so that we were about to close our first doors. And we certainly achieved exactly that with Brainwavz, when were were one of two blogs who identified major problems. Not being yes-men threatened our blogging existence as the interest in our analyses from the side of the merchants appeared to fade. But we survived thanks to a few “hot” iems, such as the Sony MH755 (purchased by Biodegraded) and the Senfer DT06. In fact, these earphones were carrying our blog up the ladder in terms of views…and attracted new partners.

When Slater scaled back and the workload became too heavy, and Biodegraded moved away, we reached out and found another couple of Head-Fiers with audio-engineering background to join the team: Durwood and KopiOkaya, both with their own measuring equipment. Durwood was taking over reviewing responsibilities whereas KopiOkaya is focusing on tech articles.

Consolidating…

KopiOkaya had assisted some companies in tuning earphones. He had done this entirely for free. His goal was to help them ironing out the blatant sound “mistakes” Chi-Fi was frequently suffering from. These mistakes were initially some treble spikes in the 7-10 kHz area that caused sibilance and also fatigue (mainly in western listeners). Once fixed, many earphones featured that prominent broad “sawtooth” spike area in the upper midrange at 2-4 kHz. This spike should add energy to voices but also hit the human ears’ most sensitive frequency area. This was again found offensive mostly by western ears. KopiOkaya’s idea was to find a good universal tuning for all tastes. And he asked Jürgen to comment on the production unit of the TRN V90. A new cooperation within audioreviews.org was born and the TRN V90 developed into a viewing magnet that helped catapulting our daily baseline of individual viewers from 100 to 200, and occasionally to up to 400. Simultaneously, our daily page views went up to typically between 500 and 1000, with spikes up to 1500. Our main clientele comes from the US, followed by Asia: we are strongly represented in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Hong Kong, and the Philippines…and lately Japan has been catching on. This is followed by Canada and the European countries. Thank you very much for your continued interest. We can live well with >200 individual, informed users like you per day.

KopiOkaya and Jürgen then tuned together, sometimes both of them on opposite ends of the Facebook messenger, and on opposite ends of the world, separated by 15 hours time delay. They helped tuning the KBEAR Diamond, a fantastic single DD earphone offered at a low price. Making these tuning efforts public resulted in more problems posting contributions on Head-Fi, but audio reviews.org is now proudly independent from any discussion forums. KopiOkaya has already disappeared from Head Fi, so don’t be surprised if “Otto Motor” will follow suit anytime soon. As Loomis says: “there is a big world out there”.

The Future Is Bright

We now have a great team of six independent and knowledgeable contributors. Each of us, thank god, has their own opinion. We try to remain leisurely, and we may branch out from earphones to cover all bases of portable audio. Who knows. We have all the time in the world. Definitely on the program for the near future is the tuning of the revised Blon BL-03 MkII.

But for now, we wish you a healthy, successful, and prosperous 2020. And we thank you, our users and our partners alike for our fruitful cooperation. If we had one wish, it would be that we get more subscriptions to our Facebook site…Facebook information is much faster and features our latest news first.

Keep on listening.

Further Reading

Our Favourite Earphones of 2019

Tuning The KBEAR Diamond

The Principles Of Reversible Modding