BLOG #22. Canjam NYC -2017 Report

As a rule, the most interesting stuff at the shows goes mostly unnoticed.

At Canjam NYC - 2017, it was Stephen Ambrose' (of Asius Technologies) "air buble" earphone tip.
- "For God's sake, an earphone tip"?! - you might ask.
- "What about the latest flashy new DAPs (Digital Audio Players), Tidal MQ-streaming services, new firmware updates, some new IEMS (In-The-Ear Monitors), or the new headphones?!"
I agree, there were some pleasant demos of a new stuff (particularly "Abyss" headphones mated with the lotoo "PAW Gold" DAP uploaded with a dedicated "Diane" firmware upgrade).
But first thing first, right?
Even in its "passive mode" with an air syringe (“an active” mode is in pipeline also, when “the air bubble”, which seals the ear canal, is inflated by a special signal played on a music player), sonically, Stephen' technology of an IEM' positioning and seal gives much more dramatic improvement than any of the latest "bells and whistles".
At home, audio reproduction quality's most defining aspects are room acoustics (with it's signal-to-noise ratio characteristics) and the correct speaker positioning within the room.
The same goes for the headphones and the ear monitors, where the ear canals are "the room", and the portable speakers are, well, "the speakers".
At the same time, the headphone and the earphone industry in general is "covering its head in sand" regarding these TRUE sonic priorities of the various design aspects of their products, and concentrate its effort on much less significant parameters, such as "bit-rate", or, say, how many Gbs of memory is on the board, or, which is even worse, "a wireless capability".
Let alone the stupid "noise cancelling" headphones and, especially, earphones.
All these new technologies seize the general public's full attention at the time when the most important sound quality defining parameters, beyond the inner sonic qualities of the acoustic transducers themselves, significantly more than anything else, are the good old:
A. sufficient and comfortable ear canal seal;
B. optimal drivers’ positioning within the ear canal, that is:
- the drivers must be positioned comfortably as close as possible to the tympanic membrane;
- the drivers' sound radiation patterns should match as much as possible the "main ear canal sound propagation axis".
For instance, as we use this exact "good old" system of priorities as the foundation for our own StereoPravda SPearphone IEMs, our Canjam NYC-2017 booth visitors' reaction to their sound this time provided even more support for such a “good old” system of priorities than ever before.
Briefly speaking, Stephen Ambrose 's technology is capable to allow ALL of us to reach the above sonic uppermost priority goals with significantly high level of a physical comfort.
For me his demo, when another "fringe" character - his old buddy and a legendary various professional sound technologies' inventor Kenny Schaffer – joined us to "shoot" ourselves (actually, to shoot the "air bubbles" earphone tips deep within our ear canals) with the air from the Stephen's syringe, was the most fresh and euphoric moment at the Canjam NYC-2017.
- "So, again, as always, the "fringe" birds of a feather can't help but to flock together...right?!".
...Yes, that's right, except that some of these "birds" would strongly prefer that an "outlier" word would have been rather used to define them.

12.02.2017 // Author:  (Bigmisha) // Number of views:  1707