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domingo, 27 de setembro de 2015
News: Finally! JBL Charge 2 - 1.4.1 firmwarefix
Finally with the latest firmware the JBL Charge 2 manages to be what it should have been from the very beginning back in September, when it still suffered from teething troubles.
Until now I couldn't fully recommend the JBL Charge 2 without reservations, as the issues were too disturbing and it remained rather a "also-ran" speaker among all the others.
In the meantime there was lots of discussion on Youtube regarding all those problems with many users complaining about their units still to distort, while others claimed to have no problems at all. There were theories established about serial-numbers which would indicate when the unit was manufactured and when it would be without issues. I was enjoying all this similar to reading a crime thriller.
Then finally someone from Japan came up with an undocumented trick to check the currently installed firmware on his JBL Charge 2. He finally claimed that only the latest firmware "1.4.1" would fix all problems, while all firmwares below suffered from this or that DSP-issue.
To check your firmware you have to power on your JBL Charge 2 and be sure that it won't connect to any nearby Bluetooth-device. Now press the Bluetooth button and volume + button simultaneously and keep them pressed for some seconds to finally hear a nice female voice that will tell you the firmware number, something like that: "one four one".
If you don't hear "one four one", you should get your device updated. I own a "refurbished" version that I bought back in December after returning my very first unit from September, and while my current unit didn't have all these distortion problems of the very first unit, it was still close to unsable at lower levels during the first 4-5 volume steps. After checking my firmware it said: 1.4.0, therefore I decided to update my model as soon as possible.
Unfortunately Harman never planned to make the devices user-upgradeable, thus you should contact an authorised service center. I contacted Harman directly to ask them how to proceed and 2 days later I got their response where they told me the responsible center in my area. I already knew DEC Service Center in Vienna, as they are also responsible for Panasonic repairs and I had some repeated issues with my Lumix cameras or lenses. The next day I took my JBL Charge 2 and left it there for an update. After 10 minutes I already got it back with 1.4.1-firmware installed and had a chat with the responsible technician who was well aware of the problems.
According to him this whole thing was getting quite fuzzy, as there were many users who complained about the problems, but at the very beginning even the technician wouldn't acknowledge them. There was no statement from Harman either until January where they finally issued an official update-service. A special updater-software for 1.4.1 version was provided to all service centers with a time-limit of 1 week to be downloaded, otherwise a permission for a new download had to be requested again. Login has still to be done through some Harman server etc, so this whole thing still sounds a bit "obscured" for me and I don't understand that Harman didn 't even care to contact their customers to inform them about the update. I had contacted Harman several times about this, at the very beginning they suggested to return the speaker, when I asked afterwards if there would be any update, they could have at least responded now. Given the fact that the update was already out nearly half a year, while some new owners checking their firmware are still hearing "one three eight", this is really annyoing! They could have at least communicated it in one way or the other.
Update: Check out how you can upgrade the firmware on your own here!
But the most important fact is, that the JBL Charge 2 is completely issue-free now. I measured the JBL Charge 2 with my previous 1.4.0 firmware and measured it again after the update to 1.4.1, and what you can see from the measurements is that the first 3 steps were entirely screwed up with the old firmware (green) that was incapable of producing and clean output below 150Hz while with the new firmware (blue) it measures ok. Unfortunately the very rough volume-steps that were already present with the previous versions became even stronger now. The first volume step is louder now than it was before and the 3rd volume step is nearly as loud as the 4th step from the old version. So if you intend using your JBL Charge 2 at low levels, it might be a hassle to achieve the correct loudness as the first step might be too soft, while the second one too loud already especially when using an iOS device where volume control is mirrored between speaker and player:
The new firmware also seems to come with some minimal sound-adjustments. I matched the 5th volume step for both by pulling the old version some dB up, and as you can see the new firmware took away a little bass in the region up to 300Hz (the strong peak at around 75Hz remained exactly the same though) but usually you shouldn't notice any difference at all without having a direct comparison. The other slight deviations visible are probably measuring errors due to slightly different placement (again green firmware 1.4.0 and blue 1.4.1):
After the update I would say that the JBL Charge 2 is in the top-line of current portable speakers, with a great punchy sound at all volume levels, class-leasing battery life and a lower price tag than most competition, especially now after the new Charge 2+ has been issued. Thanks to the Charge 2+, the Charge 2 can be even found far below 100$/€ which is quite a bargain. Grab one, if you were still undecided.
Many will ask if it is any better than the Denon Envaya Mini? I would say yes, if the total package is considered, as the Charge 2 makes more fun, has a much more solid battery which can also charge other devices and meanwhile it also cheaper, while the Denon became more expensive. The Denon might have a flatter and more true sound, but the JBL fares really well with its obvious bass and treble-peak that both make it more consumer oriented.
If you want to know if the Charge 2+ sounds any better than the Charge 2, stay tuned as I will compare them both directly soon.
Denon Envaya Mini teardown...
Mark, a good friend of mine finally took the risk to open his Denon Envaya Mini. For all those interested about the drivers and their specs (the drivers are rated at 4W btw.) but also those who want to know what kind of battery is built in and if it can be easily replaced, you must have a look at his video where he managed to tear his Envaya Mini nearly completely apart. Of course he also reassembled it again and made it work just like before:
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News: Speaker fidelity tests
I wanted to try out something new to allow for an even better judgement of a speaker's sound quality. Please let me know if you have some further ideas suggestions or wishes, so that this test could evolve to something helpful maybe.
With this test, which I will simply call "fidelity test" I will try to focus purely on the fidelity of a speaker and how it sounds compared to the original recording. There are lots of speaker tests and speaker videos available on Youtube which will play you some song through a speaker to show off its sound qualities. Without any additional reference (another speaker or whatever), it is hard to tell if the shown speaker really sounds that bad, or if the used recording setup, microphone or even the room, where the recording was done is just that bad, so that it makes the speaker sound bad.
Other videos are trying to compare several speakers at the same time, similar to what I was doing until now, but when switching over to the next speaker, there is hardly any difference noticeable. Such tests are pretty useless and wasted time for the creation part and for the watching part if you ask me.
I don't claim that my videos I did so far to be good, but it really took an effort to make my setup as solid as possible and allow for direct speaker comparisons without having them at home at the same time thanks to referenced volume levels and a standardized recording setup with exact distances etc.
Despite all the effort I meanwhile noticed that I might still get differences in sound when I try to record the same speaker another time. Despite the same setup both recordings might still sound a little bit different, probably because of slight differences in angle between microphone and speaker, slight differences in distance (although +/-1cm shouldn't really matter), maybe even slight differences in outfit of the room, if one shirt is hanging at the left side instead of right might have an influence hahaha...
Instead of comparing 2 or more speakers against each other like I previously did, now I want to show how close a speaker manages to sound compared to the original source. This is not really easy to achieve, as my room is acoustically not perfect. It is not a typcial room with typical acoustics. But I noticed that recordings done in this room give purer results than recordings in bigger undampened rooms. I think that the best results might be achieved outdoors, due to missing interreflections with any walls (with expection of the ground), you will get an even purer sound. Unfortunately all my outdoor videos I did so far, were a real pain to do. Despite dead kittens and locations protected against wind, I always had to fight with wind noise, plane noise, etc...
An optimized room maybe even close to anechoic would be probably the best way to go, but currently I don't have ressources for such a thing, despite my wife who already thinks I got crazy with all those stupid speakers...
My idea is to record a song through each speaker in my usual recording room at one single fixed level. This level should be set not too low and not too high to simulate a comfortable listening volume and which should give a representative result for a speaker's sound quality. I currently fixed this level to exactly half volume of the Sonos Play:1, this corresponds to about maximum volume of the Mini Jambox, or step 9/16 on the JBL Charge 2, 67% on the Soundlink Mini etc. To bring this into some measurable SPL readings the recorded music gives me the following values at a distance of 50cm:
LAFmax: ~75dB
LZpeak: ~95dB
For some speakers this level might already be too loud causing distortion or introducing compression artefacts, noticeable bass reduction etc, other speakers might sound better at even higher levels. Thanks to the dynamic sound processing of many modern active speakers, the overall sound character can differ quite much between low or high levels, as you can see here from the example measuring of the Bose Soundlink III where I overlaid both frequency responses for a rather low level (~25% blue) and a higher level (~75% red):
Both would sound completely different if both were played back with the same loudness, with only the mids still resembling the same speaker. But due to equal loudness contours of the human hearing in reality the differences might not appear that obvious as the human ear hears low and high frequencies differently at different volume levels. Everything is not that easy, still the goal is to give the best representation of the speakers sound character and bring that into relation to the original recording.
Of course with this test I cannot cover other aspects of a speaker's quality like directionality, loudness etc, as this would lead too far and make it too complicated. This fidelity test will only provide the soundquality exactly on-axis at optimum position which should give the best possible result for every speaker, I might vary the angle between speaker and microphone slightly if this gives a better result. Especially on Bose speakers the sound can change a lot if you turn them only a little bit. While many speakers might still sound good from higher above or from the side, I won't be able to give any statement on this like I already tried with some of my previous videos, where I also included sound recordings off-axis for comparison.
The used recorder and microphone will also have an influence on sound. My first preliminary tests are done with the Zoom H1, it is definitely not the most linear recorder, but I found it to record low frequencies better than the H2n, or the Olympus LS10 which I had also tried before. It seems to have some problems with treble though. It sounds too harsh and metallic compared to the original sound of the speaker.
I am in the process of trying out other recorders with a microphone that has hopefully a flatter overall response. Of course I am open for any suggestions. If other readers have more experience than me on this topic, please let me know. I really want realistic and representative results.
So far I have chosen a funky recording from Fusion-bassist Gerald Veasley, I like this track and I think it is a pretty nice recording with good definition in both bass and treble, only mising some vocals. If you have better suggestions for a testtrack please let me know. It should be a rather non-commercial track to avoid copyright issues. Maybe there are even some real musicians among the readers who would like to contribute an own song, this could also be used as promotion for their own site etc. The premise is that it has to be a recording of high quality which allows conclusions to be drawn on a speaker's sound. When executed well, this could become a big database for sound quality of various (portable) speakers that I was thinking of from the beginning.
Here you can find some first videos with speakers I currently had at hand. If you listen to them over headphones, you will immediately notice the lack of any stereo imaging from the speaker recordings compared to the original track. Maybe for better judgement I should also convert the original track to mono? When listening to these videos through speakers the lack of stereo is not as obvious though.
I am open to any suggestions, let me know if all this makes sense, and if the differences between all these speakers are noticeable at all. Please leave me a comment if you would like to contribute! Let's start with the Sonos Play:1 which is probably the most faithful speaker of the recorded ones:
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With this test, which I will simply call "fidelity test" I will try to focus purely on the fidelity of a speaker and how it sounds compared to the original recording. There are lots of speaker tests and speaker videos available on Youtube which will play you some song through a speaker to show off its sound qualities. Without any additional reference (another speaker or whatever), it is hard to tell if the shown speaker really sounds that bad, or if the used recording setup, microphone or even the room, where the recording was done is just that bad, so that it makes the speaker sound bad.
Other videos are trying to compare several speakers at the same time, similar to what I was doing until now, but when switching over to the next speaker, there is hardly any difference noticeable. Such tests are pretty useless and wasted time for the creation part and for the watching part if you ask me.
I don't claim that my videos I did so far to be good, but it really took an effort to make my setup as solid as possible and allow for direct speaker comparisons without having them at home at the same time thanks to referenced volume levels and a standardized recording setup with exact distances etc.
Despite all the effort I meanwhile noticed that I might still get differences in sound when I try to record the same speaker another time. Despite the same setup both recordings might still sound a little bit different, probably because of slight differences in angle between microphone and speaker, slight differences in distance (although +/-1cm shouldn't really matter), maybe even slight differences in outfit of the room, if one shirt is hanging at the left side instead of right might have an influence hahaha...
Instead of comparing 2 or more speakers against each other like I previously did, now I want to show how close a speaker manages to sound compared to the original source. This is not really easy to achieve, as my room is acoustically not perfect. It is not a typcial room with typical acoustics. But I noticed that recordings done in this room give purer results than recordings in bigger undampened rooms. I think that the best results might be achieved outdoors, due to missing interreflections with any walls (with expection of the ground), you will get an even purer sound. Unfortunately all my outdoor videos I did so far, were a real pain to do. Despite dead kittens and locations protected against wind, I always had to fight with wind noise, plane noise, etc...
An optimized room maybe even close to anechoic would be probably the best way to go, but currently I don't have ressources for such a thing, despite my wife who already thinks I got crazy with all those stupid speakers...
My idea is to record a song through each speaker in my usual recording room at one single fixed level. This level should be set not too low and not too high to simulate a comfortable listening volume and which should give a representative result for a speaker's sound quality. I currently fixed this level to exactly half volume of the Sonos Play:1, this corresponds to about maximum volume of the Mini Jambox, or step 9/16 on the JBL Charge 2, 67% on the Soundlink Mini etc. To bring this into some measurable SPL readings the recorded music gives me the following values at a distance of 50cm:
LAFmax: ~75dB
LZpeak: ~95dB
For some speakers this level might already be too loud causing distortion or introducing compression artefacts, noticeable bass reduction etc, other speakers might sound better at even higher levels. Thanks to the dynamic sound processing of many modern active speakers, the overall sound character can differ quite much between low or high levels, as you can see here from the example measuring of the Bose Soundlink III where I overlaid both frequency responses for a rather low level (~25% blue) and a higher level (~75% red):
Both would sound completely different if both were played back with the same loudness, with only the mids still resembling the same speaker. But due to equal loudness contours of the human hearing in reality the differences might not appear that obvious as the human ear hears low and high frequencies differently at different volume levels. Everything is not that easy, still the goal is to give the best representation of the speakers sound character and bring that into relation to the original recording.
Of course with this test I cannot cover other aspects of a speaker's quality like directionality, loudness etc, as this would lead too far and make it too complicated. This fidelity test will only provide the soundquality exactly on-axis at optimum position which should give the best possible result for every speaker, I might vary the angle between speaker and microphone slightly if this gives a better result. Especially on Bose speakers the sound can change a lot if you turn them only a little bit. While many speakers might still sound good from higher above or from the side, I won't be able to give any statement on this like I already tried with some of my previous videos, where I also included sound recordings off-axis for comparison.
The used recorder and microphone will also have an influence on sound. My first preliminary tests are done with the Zoom H1, it is definitely not the most linear recorder, but I found it to record low frequencies better than the H2n, or the Olympus LS10 which I had also tried before. It seems to have some problems with treble though. It sounds too harsh and metallic compared to the original sound of the speaker.
I am in the process of trying out other recorders with a microphone that has hopefully a flatter overall response. Of course I am open for any suggestions. If other readers have more experience than me on this topic, please let me know. I really want realistic and representative results.
So far I have chosen a funky recording from Fusion-bassist Gerald Veasley, I like this track and I think it is a pretty nice recording with good definition in both bass and treble, only mising some vocals. If you have better suggestions for a testtrack please let me know. It should be a rather non-commercial track to avoid copyright issues. Maybe there are even some real musicians among the readers who would like to contribute an own song, this could also be used as promotion for their own site etc. The premise is that it has to be a recording of high quality which allows conclusions to be drawn on a speaker's sound. When executed well, this could become a big database for sound quality of various (portable) speakers that I was thinking of from the beginning.
Here you can find some first videos with speakers I currently had at hand. If you listen to them over headphones, you will immediately notice the lack of any stereo imaging from the speaker recordings compared to the original track. Maybe for better judgement I should also convert the original track to mono? When listening to these videos through speakers the lack of stereo is not as obvious though.
I am open to any suggestions, let me know if all this makes sense, and if the differences between all these speakers are noticeable at all. Please leave me a comment if you would like to contribute! Let's start with the Sonos Play:1 which is probably the most faithful speaker of the recorded ones:
$$$ - A short note on my own behalf
Although I am not a big fan of advertisments many will probably also have noticed that there are some more ads in the blog-layout now. In future I will also add affiliate links to various amazon-stores which will be just a way to help me cover a fraction of the costs this blog is causing.
Just to let you know, I am not getting rich with this, I started this as fun project in my spare time and because of my passion for music and portable devices. Every amount of money I "earned" was put back into the blog by buying new speakers, new recording and measuring equipment and lately paying the programmer who is currently coding the new "interactive audio database":
To tell the truth I currently have more financial loss because of all this than benefit, not even mentioning the time which goes into this. Meanwhile I am even not quite sure if I will be ever able to finish everything as I liked, because there is still lots of time to be put inside to prepare all the recordings etc. My family is already protesting against this...
But with this tool I really hoped to be able to create something unique and helpful for everyone who is interested in portable speakers as much as I am and I think the new audio database could become a first important resource for everyone who wants to get a first impression of how this speaker compares against another one.
I put lots of thought into the setup to make the recordings as consistent as possible and the intention is to complement the database with new speakers continuously, although please understand that I cannot afford buying any new speaker just because someone asks me to do so. Neither do I expect any of the big boys like JBL, Bose, Sony etc. sending me speakers for free, but I welcome any loaner of anyone who would like to have their speakers recorded and added to the list. Please be patient a bit. I have already got some cool music from great musicians to be used for this tool, I am still waiting for a response from other artists if they would like to contribute. When the final playlist covering many different genres is finally finished, I can start with the recordings and then publish this tool online.
Thanks to everyone for your support and let's look ahead at even some more interesting gadgets in future!
Your, Oluv!
Pimp my JBL Charge 2 - protection tweaks for transport
A portable speaker which can be easily damaged during the first transport is pretty useless. I am not the only one who thinks that the unprotected passive radiators of the JBL Charge 2 are the weakest part of the speaker, so some owners already came up with some tweaks to protect their new gadget.
Mark from Germany is pretty skillful and he tried his tweak by cutting apart a 0.75l mineral water bottle from Vitell. He managed to form his protective caps to such an accuracy that they can even stay mounted during playing music. He was very precise in defining how big the holes must be to avoid any port-like noise or whistling. According to him the holes must have at least a diameter of 7mm. One single drawback: His speaker won't stand stable with the caps mounted because the bottom base doesn't have any function any more, apart from that a pretty nice job:
Sweetback44 from YouTube came up with his own solution for the same problem. His protection is easily "removeable" but seems quite stable for transport:
My own protection is rather simple, I just bought the bag from DuraGadget. It is a bit big though, the JBL Charge 2 has a lot of space inside. This bag might nearly be able take the larger Infinity One if opened and stretched well:
Here is another DIY solution, this time thanks to my Mum. She did this pouch from a scarf and it was originally ment for the Soundlink Mini. She chose the size quite generously, so that it could also accommodate a larger Sony SRS-X3 and now even the JBL Charge 2 fits inside with some stretching. Good thing is, the JBL Charge 2 can stay inside when playing, assumed you manage to hit the power button blindly. You lose a little bit of treble definition as the material filters high frequencies, but as the Charge 2 is not too shy of treble it doesn't do much harm to the sound. Maybe I will even do a measurement to see the impact on treble-response with and without pouch:
I welcome any other suggestions for the best protection tweaks, please leave a comment to contribute!
Audiorecording through microphone - Olympus LS5 vs. Yamaha PR7 vs. Zoom H1
My initial idea of recording different speakers under the same conditions had the goal to give objective results and maybe help others in their decision which speaker sounds better etc.
But it turned out not to be that easy.
The biggest challenge would be to create a controlled enviroment, so that recording of different speakers over time with directly comparable results was possible. But this would imply an own recording room, maybe even acoustically optimized and a controlled recording procedure with fixed positions for speakers, microphone etc, similar to that Dpreview is doing with their test-scene to allow the comparison of different cameras.
I am not sure anything like that has ever been done with speakers. There are lots of speaker-measurements in various Audio and Hifi-magazines, but I have never seen audio recordings of them.
To really allow perfect results such a recording should be done with the best possible recording-equipment that is able to record even the finest sound-nuances. This does not only mean lots of effort and time, but also costs. I have no idea if something like a microphone with linear frequency response exists at all. Here you can see the (claimed) frequency response of the Zoom H1 microphones:
When I started doing my recordings I tried out different audio-recorders. Although the Zoom H1 is overall very popular, I assume this is probably because it is one of the cheaptest, therefore I wanted to try some other ones and added the Olympus LS5 and Yamaha Pockettrack PR7 to my test.
In the following Video I recorded the Sonos Play:1 with all 3 recorders and also mixed in the original recording (from 2:39), so that you can compare which recorder comes closest. I am really not sure, first I thought the Zoom H1 sounded best, but compared to the original recording it also sounds most different. Of course the speaker also distorts the original signal, so the sound characteristics of the speakers adds up to the characteristics of the microphone, not to mention the acoustics of my room, which is not optimized by any means for such a recording.
Still I would like to know which recorder you think gives the best representation of the original recording.
Maybe some of you even own the Play:1 and could listen to the original track through their speaker and compare to the recording. The original track is "Get Back" from "Silent Partner" and is taken from the Youtube Audio library to avoid any copyright issues.
The final idea would be to create a kind of "database" where all speakers can be selected and compared. Unfortunately I am afraid that my know-how is not high enough, and I don't have the money for that. You would also need to have contacts to Hifi-dealers that might lend you speakers for a recording session etc....
Maybe someone else will do this once, so far you have to be satisfied with my amateur-ish approach.
News: Binaural speaker recordings
When I had the idea of doing "fidelity-tests" of various speakers, I quickly noticed that it wouldn't be that easy to achieve really representative results.
Apart from room acoustics etc. the microphones have a too strong self-sound, to really allow valid results. I had tested more than half dozen different handheld recorders, from Olympus to Yamaha and Zoom. And all of them sounded so different that I doubt they would allow any neutral results.
To give it another try, I lately ordered a Zoom H5 and an optional XYH-6 capsule as I hoped these would give me significant improvements over the "cheap" Zoom H1 recorder that I am currently using, but in the end, the results were even worse. Not only did both mic-capsules emphasize treble too much, they did roll-off with low frequencies too strong, and there was a noticable divergency between left/right channel with the sound being not centered as it should be. Both microphones had a different bias towards left or right, therefore I sent both back totally disappointed.
Currently it seems as if I was still at the very beginning to find a better but still affordable recording solution which would allow the most neutral and flat recording.
You can hear some of my previous test-recordings here. In this case the JBL Charge 2 was recorded with all recorder/microphone combinations in the same room with the same settings/distance etc. As the XYH-6 capsule supports 2 different directional patterns, I did recordings with both, you can also check out the original track for comparison:
Excerpt of the original track:
Zoom H1:
Zoom H5:
Zoom H5+XYH-6 90°:
Zoom H5+XYH-6 120°:
I think it is pretty obvious that all the used microphones have a different sound, there is even a noticeable sound-difference between the 90° and 120° setting of the XYH-6 capulse. I also tried a recording with my current measuring microphone the MiniDSP UMIK-1, but so far I am still in the process to include the calibration file into the recording procedure and will post it as soon as I managed.
At the same time, I had also ordered a Roland CS-10EM binaural microphone. I wanted to try out something new and although these microphones are not really suitable for neutral direct recordings of a speaker, they seem perfectly suitable to record how a speaker would sound in a particular room thanks to a rather neutral sound. You have to wear headphones to hear how the sound was meant to be, or you can try playing it back through speakers with a crosstalk cancelling filter like "Liveaudio" from the Mini Jambox.
To understand better how the listening situation was, what kind of room etc, I also did a photo of each listening position, so that you can see what I heard when I did those recordings wearing the microphones inside my ears. I am curious what you think about this kind of audio-demo, and if I should continue using it in future for further speaker comparisons too. I did not normalize the recordings, so the difference in loudness you hear is real and represents the real situation.
Again I used the JBL Charge 2 (my current portable reference despite all the distortion issues, it is one of the best sounding portable speakers which can be already had for 129€) and recorded it in different rooms and positions from different distances, please have a look (and don't forget to listen through headphones):
Equally to the JBL I also tried recording some further speakers inside the shelf in the living room, I wonder if you can hear the difference in sound between all of them. I think that especially the increased stereo-separation of the EVA Blu and the Bose compared to the JBL Charge 2 and the mono Play:1 is pretty obvious:
Please let me know what you think about these recordings. Does the binaural effect work for you? Do these recordings sound more real than the previous ones I did? Which listening position does represent the most realistic situation for you?
Please leave a comment if you have further ideas!
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Apart from room acoustics etc. the microphones have a too strong self-sound, to really allow valid results. I had tested more than half dozen different handheld recorders, from Olympus to Yamaha and Zoom. And all of them sounded so different that I doubt they would allow any neutral results.
To give it another try, I lately ordered a Zoom H5 and an optional XYH-6 capsule as I hoped these would give me significant improvements over the "cheap" Zoom H1 recorder that I am currently using, but in the end, the results were even worse. Not only did both mic-capsules emphasize treble too much, they did roll-off with low frequencies too strong, and there was a noticable divergency between left/right channel with the sound being not centered as it should be. Both microphones had a different bias towards left or right, therefore I sent both back totally disappointed.
Currently it seems as if I was still at the very beginning to find a better but still affordable recording solution which would allow the most neutral and flat recording.
You can hear some of my previous test-recordings here. In this case the JBL Charge 2 was recorded with all recorder/microphone combinations in the same room with the same settings/distance etc. As the XYH-6 capsule supports 2 different directional patterns, I did recordings with both, you can also check out the original track for comparison:
Excerpt of the original track:
Zoom H1:
Zoom H5:
Zoom H5+XYH-6 90°:
Zoom H5+XYH-6 120°:
I think it is pretty obvious that all the used microphones have a different sound, there is even a noticeable sound-difference between the 90° and 120° setting of the XYH-6 capulse. I also tried a recording with my current measuring microphone the MiniDSP UMIK-1, but so far I am still in the process to include the calibration file into the recording procedure and will post it as soon as I managed.
At the same time, I had also ordered a Roland CS-10EM binaural microphone. I wanted to try out something new and although these microphones are not really suitable for neutral direct recordings of a speaker, they seem perfectly suitable to record how a speaker would sound in a particular room thanks to a rather neutral sound. You have to wear headphones to hear how the sound was meant to be, or you can try playing it back through speakers with a crosstalk cancelling filter like "Liveaudio" from the Mini Jambox.
To understand better how the listening situation was, what kind of room etc, I also did a photo of each listening position, so that you can see what I heard when I did those recordings wearing the microphones inside my ears. I am curious what you think about this kind of audio-demo, and if I should continue using it in future for further speaker comparisons too. I did not normalize the recordings, so the difference in loudness you hear is real and represents the real situation.
Again I used the JBL Charge 2 (my current portable reference despite all the distortion issues, it is one of the best sounding portable speakers which can be already had for 129€) and recorded it in different rooms and positions from different distances, please have a look (and don't forget to listen through headphones):
Equally to the JBL I also tried recording some further speakers inside the shelf in the living room, I wonder if you can hear the difference in sound between all of them. I think that especially the increased stereo-separation of the EVA Blu and the Bose compared to the JBL Charge 2 and the mono Play:1 is pretty obvious:
Please let me know what you think about these recordings. Does the binaural effect work for you? Do these recordings sound more real than the previous ones I did? Which listening position does represent the most realistic situation for you?
Please leave a comment if you have further ideas!
Some videos...
I didn't have lots of time lately doing reviews etc.
Originally I planned to do a review of the Loewe Speaker 2go, the UE Boom etc... but it is really time consuming to prepare the stuff, write about it, and then still make it appear understandable to others, especially in English.
But I was not completely inactive during this time, as I have prepared lots of different comparison videos. If you haven't subscribed to my Youtube channel, here are some recent videos for you:
Bose Soundlink Mini vs. UE Boom:
Bose Soundlink III vs. Loewe Speaker 2go:
An updated comparison of the Soundmatters FoxL vs Bose Soundlink Mini:
TDK A33 vs Bose Soundlink Mini:
TDK A33 vs Bose Soundlink Mini outdoors:
Bose Soundlink Mini vs. Harman Kardon Esquire:
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Originally I planned to do a review of the Loewe Speaker 2go, the UE Boom etc... but it is really time consuming to prepare the stuff, write about it, and then still make it appear understandable to others, especially in English.
But I was not completely inactive during this time, as I have prepared lots of different comparison videos. If you haven't subscribed to my Youtube channel, here are some recent videos for you:
Bose Soundlink Mini vs. UE Boom:
Bose Soundlink III vs. Loewe Speaker 2go:
An updated comparison of the Soundmatters FoxL vs Bose Soundlink Mini:
TDK A33 vs Bose Soundlink Mini:
TDK A33 vs Bose Soundlink Mini outdoors:
Bose Soundlink Mini vs. Harman Kardon Esquire:
English oder Deutsch?
Let's welcome all international readers!
I had a tough time deciding whether to continue this blog in English or if to continue it at all, because I am a bit short of time lately, due to our great little son, who meanwhile even thinks to have to keep us busy during night as well.
It is already hard for me to find time to write anything in German, which btw. is not my mother language either. I am not a native speaker and I always had rather mediocre marks at school in English as a subject, therefore I am a bit afraid of not being able to express myself as well when trying to describe sound-related facts, as i would be when writing in German. But I think writing in English will reach even more people interested in my reviews. I also hope that writing in English will not scare off my exisiting readers, who kept following my postings constantly.
I noticed that my YouTube videos, which just started as a spontaneous idea got quite a positive feedback from nearly the whole world, while only few complained my videos to be faked and false.
I can only assure you that I have no advantage or profit of faking reviews. I started this blog for fun and because of my passion for listening and comparing speakers. I do this in my spare time, or sometimes at work, when my boss is not watching ;-)
I never got any payment or reward for writing a review. I don't care if Bose or JBL sounds better, I just want to show you how they sound when directly compared one to each other.
My next review will be about the brand new and funky Harman Kardon Onyx speaker. I will also try to compare it to the similarly looking Libratone Loop, which hopefully should arrive during the next weeks, so please stay tuned!
PS. I cannot promise to write any new added review in English. Some particular postings might remain in German, but maybe I will even try to translate some of my former German reviews.
Ler mais »
I had a tough time deciding whether to continue this blog in English or if to continue it at all, because I am a bit short of time lately, due to our great little son, who meanwhile even thinks to have to keep us busy during night as well.
It is already hard for me to find time to write anything in German, which btw. is not my mother language either. I am not a native speaker and I always had rather mediocre marks at school in English as a subject, therefore I am a bit afraid of not being able to express myself as well when trying to describe sound-related facts, as i would be when writing in German. But I think writing in English will reach even more people interested in my reviews. I also hope that writing in English will not scare off my exisiting readers, who kept following my postings constantly.
I noticed that my YouTube videos, which just started as a spontaneous idea got quite a positive feedback from nearly the whole world, while only few complained my videos to be faked and false.
I can only assure you that I have no advantage or profit of faking reviews. I started this blog for fun and because of my passion for listening and comparing speakers. I do this in my spare time, or sometimes at work, when my boss is not watching ;-)
I never got any payment or reward for writing a review. I don't care if Bose or JBL sounds better, I just want to show you how they sound when directly compared one to each other.
My next review will be about the brand new and funky Harman Kardon Onyx speaker. I will also try to compare it to the similarly looking Libratone Loop, which hopefully should arrive during the next weeks, so please stay tuned!
PS. I cannot promise to write any new added review in English. Some particular postings might remain in German, but maybe I will even try to translate some of my former German reviews.
News: JBL Charge 2 firmwareupdate 1.4.1 - do it yourself
Thanks to this great community here, some anonymous contributor has published a way how to update the JBL Charge 2 on your own. The necessary firmware file was already posted by someone else some time ago, but so far there was no way how to perform the update without the right software. As many still seem to fight with JBL-support who is taking their customers for fools claiming that there is no firmware update available for the JBL Charge 2 I think we have to thank our unknown hero for posting this. He provided an archive including the 1.4.1 firmware-file, an installation manual and the CSR BlueSuiteNow.
Of course I cannot provide any warranty that you will not brick your device, but acoording to many owners they were able to successfully update his Charge 2 from 1.3.8 to 1.4.1:
Here are some alternate download-links:
http://putit.ru/download/MjMxNjU3OTYyMTUzOA==
http://my-files.ru/d58uuf.JBL_CHARGE_2.7z
http://rghost.net/89c8X5SPh
Please let us know if your update was successful!
WARNING: Some already managed to brick their speakers, so apply on your own risk!
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Of course I cannot provide any warranty that you will not brick your device, but acoording to many owners they were able to successfully update his Charge 2 from 1.3.8 to 1.4.1:
Here are some alternate download-links:
http://putit.ru/download/MjMxNjU3OTYyMTUzOA==
http://my-files.ru/d58uuf.JBL_CHARGE_2.7z
http://rghost.net/89c8X5SPh
Please let us know if your update was successful!
WARNING: Some already managed to brick their speakers, so apply on your own risk!
sábado, 26 de setembro de 2015
Measuring speakers, a first apporach
I hope there are some readers out there who appreciate my work of doing speaker reviews and comparisons. I am not really sure, because the comment sections remain mostly silent, therefore it is not easy for me to judge if I should evolve my reviews even further, or if it would be just wasted effort.
Experiencing "sound" is mostly a matter of subjective and personal taste. Describing sound to someone else is even harder, espcially for me being a non-native speaker.
Therefore I introduced my first comparison videos 1 year ago, which were still very clumsy and not recorded that well. But I continued to improve the recordings as well as optimize my whole recording setup. My idea was that two or more speakers could be compared pretty well to each other by just listening to them, without having to write a single word. When hearing two speakers on your own and noticing the change in sound when one switches over to the next one, this would be the most objective sound comparison I can provide. Of course everyone listens with different speakers, or different headphones, so everyone will be hearing something else, but the relative difference between two speakers will always remain the same. I also doubt that my recording microphone is as linear calibrated as it is claimed to be, thus there will always be some deviation from the pure original sound already starting with the microphone. But as long as both speakers are recorded in the same way, with the same microphone etc. they should still be comparable pretty well.
Meanwhile I think to have managed a kind of standardized setup, where I can record various speakers successively without even having them at hand at the same time. I have my recording room that you can see in the image below, which always remains the same. It is a small room we use as a garderobe which is acoustically quite dampened compared to normally furnished rooms. It is still not comparable to a real anechoic chamber, but all speakers sound considerably more "pure" in this room, that's why I chose it for my recordings and for all further measuerments.
I usually have a fixed distance to the recorded speaker and I have my fixed volume levels which I derived from the Soundlink Mini and continue using them. So I could even build up a data-base with all the recorded speakers so far, so everyone could switch "live" between different models for their liking. Unfortunately I have too little experience, how to achieve something like that, I am not a programmer, so I won't be able to manage something like that.
Recently I discovered Sonic Sense Pro Audio, doing something very similar, but in a much more sophisticated and professional way with the only difference that they are comparing professional recording equipment, studio monitors and headphones instead of cheap portable speakers.
But I found their headphone recordings particularly interesting, where you are given the chance of listening to various different headphone models and comparing them to the original source tracks, you must have a listen! I wonder which you think sounds closest to the original source!
Of course I cannot afford any of the recording equipment Sonic Sense uses, nor do I have the time to perform such complex tests, but I would like to add some more data to my reviews which might somehow prove what I am hearing and why this or that speaker sounds that way and not the other.
Some time ago I ordered a cheap Dayton iMM-6 calibrated measuring microphone for mobile phones or tablets to fool around with it a little bit. There are lots of different audio-apps for iOS which provide FFT spectrum analysis. Some are really expensive, so I settled for "Audio Tools" from Studio Six Digital as it seemed to be the only one which could also read the calibration-file of my microphone.
But now all problems began. How should I measure a speaker? Is pink noise precise enough, or should I use a sine-sweep instead? Which distance should I choose to the speaker? Which room? The simple iOS apps don't provide any gated measuring, which is more or less standard on most desktop-programs like REW etc and allows a quasi-anechoic measurement with any room-influence being eliminated. But I wanted to keep things as simple as possible, just attaching the microphone to my iPhone and having a mobile measuring tool.
As the iMM-6 microphone has a headphone pass-through I was able to hear what the microphone was actually measuring. I noticed that when playing pink noise through a speaker and moving it slightly to the left or right or turning it, the resulting sound changed considerably. I already noticed the same with my audio recordings. A perfectly centered perpendicular positioning of the microphone gave worse results than rather setting it up slightly offset with the speaker turned away a little bit, which usually gave the clearest sound with most portable speakers that suffer from a rather directional sound. It might also be interference of both drivers resulting in comb-filter effects, when the microphone is setup exactly within the center of both drivers.
Then I tried to elaborate a typcial measuring procedure. I should probably measure a speaker from various fixed angles, I also thought that a speaker with dynamic sound adjustment should be measured at different volume levels in order to show how the overall sound changes with the actual volume.
I tried to demonstrate this with the a quick measurement of the Bose Soundlink Mini when it was playing at 30%, 50%, 75% and 100% volume. You can clearly see that from 75% upwards the lowest frequencies are already reduced considerably resulting in a more compressed frequency response. At 30% and 50% you see an obvious bass-boost as well as a lower-treble boost above 2kHz and a strong treble roll-off starting at 12kHz which probably is the reason why the Soundlink Mini has the tendency to sound muffled.
This measurement is smoothed with 1 octave, unsmoothed the curves show much more humps and notches, which are probably the result of early room-reflections interfering with the original measured signal.
To minimize room effects I even tried performing some outdoor measurements. During night it is mostly silent, so I set up my "portable measuring studio" in the garden and tried the same measurements outdoors to have a direct comparison with the indoor measurements.
Unfortunately also the outdoor measurements showed lots of interference, probably due to the nearby house and the ground. You would obviously need a much larger open space and a higher distance above the ground to really get quasi anechoic results. Both measurements look as if they could be a completely different speaker, in this case the Sony SRS-X3 was measured from the same 50cm distance with the same fixed level of 70dB:
All this made me finally order another calibrated USB-microphone, so that I am currently trying to manage some better measurements with my notebook and REW to see if the results are really more significant than what I got from my first quick and dirty approach.
A first measuring test with the miniDSP UMIK-1 microphone and REW of the Bose Soundlink Mini at various distances in my usual recording room shows how much the results change depending on distance from the speaker. At 1 meter there are already too much room reflections to be regarded as representative.
I also tried some further measurements in our living room, here is the result for 100cm distance, compared to the 100cm measurement from our garderobe and as you can see due to stronger reflections the living room measurement has considerably stronger bass:
If I manage a reliable measuring-workflow I would like to measure every speaker I currently have at home as well as every new speaker that I will review in future to be able to provide additional frequency response data, which will hopefully be able to add some objective insights into the real frequency response of a given speaker. You can already find my review of the Mini Jambox here, where I tried to add lots of frequency measurements and comparisons.
There are some other ressources which also provide speaker measuring data. I highly regard Brent Butterworth as professional speaker-tester, here you can see his measurement of the Beats Pill XL at various angles:
Compared to my outdoor measurement at 60dB and 70dB with the Dayton iMM6 microphone (unsmoothed):
And here my indoor measurement with the new miniDSP UMIK-1 (smoothed with 1/48 octave):
Also lesnumeriques has already measured lots of different portable speakers, here their measurement of the Pill XL:
On the other hand I am not really sure what they are actually measuering. Here you can see their measurement of the Bose Soundlink Mini, which looks so much different to what I am getting:
It seems to be quite an effort to complete a whole measurement for one single speaker including setup, measurment from all angles, with different volume levels, and maybe even with different sound modes. So keep your fingers crossed that all this won't get out of my hands quickly and stay tuned for some speaker measurements in future!
Ler mais »
Experiencing "sound" is mostly a matter of subjective and personal taste. Describing sound to someone else is even harder, espcially for me being a non-native speaker.
Therefore I introduced my first comparison videos 1 year ago, which were still very clumsy and not recorded that well. But I continued to improve the recordings as well as optimize my whole recording setup. My idea was that two or more speakers could be compared pretty well to each other by just listening to them, without having to write a single word. When hearing two speakers on your own and noticing the change in sound when one switches over to the next one, this would be the most objective sound comparison I can provide. Of course everyone listens with different speakers, or different headphones, so everyone will be hearing something else, but the relative difference between two speakers will always remain the same. I also doubt that my recording microphone is as linear calibrated as it is claimed to be, thus there will always be some deviation from the pure original sound already starting with the microphone. But as long as both speakers are recorded in the same way, with the same microphone etc. they should still be comparable pretty well.
Meanwhile I think to have managed a kind of standardized setup, where I can record various speakers successively without even having them at hand at the same time. I have my recording room that you can see in the image below, which always remains the same. It is a small room we use as a garderobe which is acoustically quite dampened compared to normally furnished rooms. It is still not comparable to a real anechoic chamber, but all speakers sound considerably more "pure" in this room, that's why I chose it for my recordings and for all further measuerments.
I usually have a fixed distance to the recorded speaker and I have my fixed volume levels which I derived from the Soundlink Mini and continue using them. So I could even build up a data-base with all the recorded speakers so far, so everyone could switch "live" between different models for their liking. Unfortunately I have too little experience, how to achieve something like that, I am not a programmer, so I won't be able to manage something like that.
Recently I discovered Sonic Sense Pro Audio, doing something very similar, but in a much more sophisticated and professional way with the only difference that they are comparing professional recording equipment, studio monitors and headphones instead of cheap portable speakers.
But I found their headphone recordings particularly interesting, where you are given the chance of listening to various different headphone models and comparing them to the original source tracks, you must have a listen! I wonder which you think sounds closest to the original source!
Of course I cannot afford any of the recording equipment Sonic Sense uses, nor do I have the time to perform such complex tests, but I would like to add some more data to my reviews which might somehow prove what I am hearing and why this or that speaker sounds that way and not the other.
Some time ago I ordered a cheap Dayton iMM-6 calibrated measuring microphone for mobile phones or tablets to fool around with it a little bit. There are lots of different audio-apps for iOS which provide FFT spectrum analysis. Some are really expensive, so I settled for "Audio Tools" from Studio Six Digital as it seemed to be the only one which could also read the calibration-file of my microphone.
But now all problems began. How should I measure a speaker? Is pink noise precise enough, or should I use a sine-sweep instead? Which distance should I choose to the speaker? Which room? The simple iOS apps don't provide any gated measuring, which is more or less standard on most desktop-programs like REW etc and allows a quasi-anechoic measurement with any room-influence being eliminated. But I wanted to keep things as simple as possible, just attaching the microphone to my iPhone and having a mobile measuring tool.
As the iMM-6 microphone has a headphone pass-through I was able to hear what the microphone was actually measuring. I noticed that when playing pink noise through a speaker and moving it slightly to the left or right or turning it, the resulting sound changed considerably. I already noticed the same with my audio recordings. A perfectly centered perpendicular positioning of the microphone gave worse results than rather setting it up slightly offset with the speaker turned away a little bit, which usually gave the clearest sound with most portable speakers that suffer from a rather directional sound. It might also be interference of both drivers resulting in comb-filter effects, when the microphone is setup exactly within the center of both drivers.
Then I tried to elaborate a typcial measuring procedure. I should probably measure a speaker from various fixed angles, I also thought that a speaker with dynamic sound adjustment should be measured at different volume levels in order to show how the overall sound changes with the actual volume.
I tried to demonstrate this with the a quick measurement of the Bose Soundlink Mini when it was playing at 30%, 50%, 75% and 100% volume. You can clearly see that from 75% upwards the lowest frequencies are already reduced considerably resulting in a more compressed frequency response. At 30% and 50% you see an obvious bass-boost as well as a lower-treble boost above 2kHz and a strong treble roll-off starting at 12kHz which probably is the reason why the Soundlink Mini has the tendency to sound muffled.
To minimize room effects I even tried performing some outdoor measurements. During night it is mostly silent, so I set up my "portable measuring studio" in the garden and tried the same measurements outdoors to have a direct comparison with the indoor measurements.
Unfortunately also the outdoor measurements showed lots of interference, probably due to the nearby house and the ground. You would obviously need a much larger open space and a higher distance above the ground to really get quasi anechoic results. Both measurements look as if they could be a completely different speaker, in this case the Sony SRS-X3 was measured from the same 50cm distance with the same fixed level of 70dB:
All this made me finally order another calibrated USB-microphone, so that I am currently trying to manage some better measurements with my notebook and REW to see if the results are really more significant than what I got from my first quick and dirty approach.
A first measuring test with the miniDSP UMIK-1 microphone and REW of the Bose Soundlink Mini at various distances in my usual recording room shows how much the results change depending on distance from the speaker. At 1 meter there are already too much room reflections to be regarded as representative.
I also tried some further measurements in our living room, here is the result for 100cm distance, compared to the 100cm measurement from our garderobe and as you can see due to stronger reflections the living room measurement has considerably stronger bass:
If I manage a reliable measuring-workflow I would like to measure every speaker I currently have at home as well as every new speaker that I will review in future to be able to provide additional frequency response data, which will hopefully be able to add some objective insights into the real frequency response of a given speaker. You can already find my review of the Mini Jambox here, where I tried to add lots of frequency measurements and comparisons.
There are some other ressources which also provide speaker measuring data. I highly regard Brent Butterworth as professional speaker-tester, here you can see his measurement of the Beats Pill XL at various angles:
And here my indoor measurement with the new miniDSP UMIK-1 (smoothed with 1/48 octave):
Also lesnumeriques has already measured lots of different portable speakers, here their measurement of the Pill XL:
On the other hand I am not really sure what they are actually measuering. Here you can see their measurement of the Bose Soundlink Mini, which looks so much different to what I am getting:
It seems to be quite an effort to complete a whole measurement for one single speaker including setup, measurment from all angles, with different volume levels, and maybe even with different sound modes. So keep your fingers crossed that all this won't get out of my hands quickly and stay tuned for some speaker measurements in future!
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