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dreg-heap · 1 year

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I'm gonna try to do a better job of documenting my progress on IEMs, I made a pair of headphones last year and wasn't organized enough with it lol so here we go

DIY IEM progress!

I'll tag future progress as #iem to keep track

Let's start with some definitions!

Frequency response:

Frequency response is a headphone/speaker/IEM's ability to produce certain frequencies, displayed in a frequency response graph:

The X axis is the sound frequency in hertz, the Y axis is the volume in decibels. The higher it is at each point, the louder that part of the sound is. For speakers, ideally, you want everything to be perfectly flat, no part of the music louder than any other part, but for headphones and IEMs the shape and sensitivity in the ear means you want it to be louder in the subbass(20-400ish Hz) which gives you that nice rumble when bass hits and the upper midrange/lower treble(1k-10k hz), which emphasizes higher vocals and percussion sounds like cymbals, bells etc. With the airpods max you can see there's a respectable bass boost, but the midrange isn't quite as high as the person who graphed them would like it to be, as shown by his "ideal" target response represented by the dotted line.

Differences in frequency response can help you predict how different headphones will sound, with peaks and valleys at different areas emphasizing different parts of the music. Here we have the upper midrange focused moondrop variations with a peak at 3 kHz and a noticeable downward slope in the bass creating a relaxed sound where the bass is noticeably separate from the rest of the music, compared to the punchy, bass-focused Sony Z1R with an uninterrupted subbass shelf and a valley in the upper midrange:

IEM:

IEM stands for In-ear monitor! These are different from earbuds in that they go directly in your ear and provide a seal.

Airpods are earbuds because they sit loosely in your ear

Airpods pro are IEMs because they have rubber tips that fit into your ear canal

Drivers:

A driver is the thing in a headphone/speaker/iem/whatever that makes the sound. The one you'll be most familiar with is the dynamic driver, where a coil is attached to a diaphragm that gets moved by a magnet behind it. There's other kinds like planar magnetic drivers, balanced armatures, and electrostatic drivers that give varying levels of detail in exchange for different timbre, punch, clarity and other things that nobody can really define or measure so they just lump it all into one category called "technicalities". For this project I'm just going to be working with dynamic drivers because I do not want to deal with that shit! Please and thank you!

So what am I doing?

Now the fun part of IEMs compared to headphones is that there's lots more room to have multiple drivers! With headphones you're (usually) restricted to one driver playing the whole frequency range by itself. With IEMs, the components are small enough that you can start playing with crossover circuits, which can divide the range between multiple drivers, doing stuff like delegating the bass to one driver while another driver does the midrange and treble. Some iems can get obscenely complicated with their driver configurations, but for my purposes I'll be limiting myself to two dynamic drivers, one tweeter that plays the upper midrange/treble and a larger woofer that plays the lower midrange and bass

My concept, based on sony's Z1R iem, places the larger driver behind the smaller. Having one driver in front of the other acts as a low pass filter, and the amount of low-frequency sound that gets blocked out will depend on how large the opening above the smaller driver is.

The shell will be 3D printed resin(I'm hoping I can use my work's printer but if my boss says no I can outsource it like I did last time) and the drivers will be harvested from two cheap but very competent IEMs, the moondrop quarks and the 7Hertz Zero.

Both these iems are fairly balanced(the 7hertz certainly moreso than the quarks, I highly recommend them if you've never tried good IEMs), and that goofy looking peak at 3K makes me think placing the crossover frequency(the point where one driver starts and the other begins) at that point might be ideal.

They'll be coming in the mail soon, and I'll come back with an update when I've cut them open to harvest their parts!

#iem

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symptoms-syndrome · 2 years

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In other news. Time to talk abt some Shit going on in my life. Under a readmore primarily bc i know there's a lot of eyes on my blog RN on account of some posts I did not expect to blow up

I'm back in my apartment, mostly recovered or recovered enough that I can take care of myself on my own for the most part. I still have a tube which sucks, I was only expecting to have it for three weeks and I'm going to need it for at least five or six.

But anyway that's just context.

The main issue is that the Roommate Situation is making me extremely triggered even though nothing is actually happening. Like I almost never see them, they stay in their room or go out sometimes but never linger. I know they said they're moving out in September, at some point I'm going to have to ask when a good time for house tours for prospective new roommates would be. I might have a friend who's interested in moving in, which would be nice.

But anyway. It just feels like I'm back in my childhood home where everything is silent until it suddenly is very much not. The tension is palpable. Flashback brain says stay very very quiet, when I'm sensitive like this I'm incredibly highly aware of every sound. I open things quietly and close doors carefully, if I need to close them. I've had the courage to hang out in the living room primarily because. As I said before the bad roommates don't step foot in there, and I think it makes me less anxious than staying in my room where it feels like anything could be happening outside my door. The living room has a sort of half wall situation which makes it feel more connected to the rest of the house. It's one of the things I really like about this place. But anyway I've been in there playing my video games but I wear headphones so there's no sound coming out. I tell myself it's because I don't want to bother anyone, but one I don't think that any reasonable person would be extremely bothered by me playing Pokemon at a reasonable to very low volume at like, 2PM, and two I don't think that I should be as scared as I am. But alas. Roommates are not reasonable people. I still freeze up in whatever I'm doing (even just. Folding clothes in my room) when I hear them coming out of their respective rooms.

When my good roommate comes home, I feel kinda guilty about the way I act. I'm still very quiet. I want her to know it's not about her. I do get the courage to put on a show to watch together out loud (but still low, but mostly because I don't like things too loud in general) but I still speak quietly.

I'm naturally sort of soft-spoken because I'm usually just. Very aware of the volume of my voice, and try to keep it to a level where it would just be heard by me and my intended audience. Of course, being a public speaker I am able to project, I just normally don't speak very loudly in conversation. My good roommate is very much not, she speaks very loudly and I don't think she's aware of it most of the time. Most of the time I don't mind it, I'll really only ask her to lower her voice if I have a headache or something. I do want to tell her to lower her voice when she comes home lately, but it's because something in my brain feels like it's screaming about her voice breaking the silence I've deliberately created. It's not accidentally so quiet, it's incredibly intentional. It's not a quiet meant to be broken. Her speaking loudly is like setting off a tripwire, it makes my whole head fill with alarms ringing to alert me that danger is coming.

I don't think my roommates would actually try and get physical with me. Mostly because they're both kind of. Wimpy. Like I think if I played my game out loud or talked at a normal volume or whatever I don't think anything would actually happen. But my brain doesn't actually believe that. It seems to believe that there is danger just around the corner ready to drop on me at any moment if I'm not very very careful.

They could leave before September. They could sublet their rooms. I genuinely think they're too stupid to know they can do that, because I suggested it before and they shot the idea down (or one of them did) and all he kept saying was "my name is on the lease." Which it is, but that doesn't mean he can't sublet. IDK what he's on about but he's always been a little behind the curve. When he was on regular, friend-ish terms with me and good roommate, I told good roommate to "just let him be stupid sometimes" because he'd say the most batshit insane, objectively incorrect things ever and then blow the fuck up on you if you challenged him on them. So it was easier to just let him say whatever and move on with it. And by objectively wrong I mean that but also just. Offensive AF sometimes. Like one time he used the word "jew" in a way that was? A lil too laissez faire and one of our roommates at that time gently said something like "it's probably better to use Jewish instead" and this shitty roommate turned that into a HUGE yelling argument and we're all three like dude. Just add one syllable it's not that big a deal. Two Jewish ppl are correcting u very nicely. But shitty roommate pulled the "you're just cancelling me for something stupid, I'll just never say anything ever again" card and stormed off. So there's that. I think he thinks bc he's gay he's just. Immune to being insensitive to other minority groups. Ugh.

Anyway this is your future representative or whatever. He's in grad school for polisci he wants to be a politician. I bet he could be.

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