On listening
I’m deeply into audio: headphones, in-ear monitors, and all the small gear around them. I can read a frequency response graph, and now and then I tune my own gear.
What keeps me interested is that audio sits right where measurement meets perception. A graph tells you what a driver does. What you actually hear also depends on your ears, the fit, and the seal. There’s a gap between the two, and my IEM listening test is an experiment in exactly that gap.
What I listen on
In my ears
- Truthear Hexa Named Hexa, has four drivers. I stopped asking.
- Moondrop Chu III Bought on instinct, purely for sleeping. It takes the job very seriously.
- Tanchjim Bunny The name gets a laugh. The sound doesn’t.
No cables
- Roseselsa Ceramics Ultra For days when even a cable is too much commitment.
- JBL Tune 770NC Yes, an audiophile with JBLs. Noise cancelling doesn’t care about target curves.
- JBL Flip 5 For when the whole room should hear it. At a party, accuracy is optional.
Between the phone and the ears
- JCally JM98 Max Because phones stopped having headphone jacks.
- CrinEar Protocol Micro My EQ lives on the dongle itself, so my tuning follows me to any device.
Find the boost
A small ear-training game. Pink noise plays with one band turned up by 10 dB. Switch between flat and boosted, listen for what changed, then guess which band it was. Five rounds.
Headphones help. Start with your volume low.
Score: 0
On coffee
I brew my own coffee every day. Mostly pour-over and AeroPress, plus whatever else I’m trying that week.
It’s the most hands-on optimization problem in my day, and the only one I get to drink.
Dialling in
A cup of coffee has more knobs than it looks like:
- Dose. How much coffee goes in.
- Ratio. How much water for that coffee.
- Grind size. Finer extracts faster, coarser slower.
- Water temperature. Hotter water pulls more out of the grounds.
- Time. How long the water and coffee spend together.
Change one thing, taste, adjust, repeat. It’s gradient descent with a kettle, and the loss function is my tongue. Mostly, it takes patience.
How I brew
Pour-over
The slow, careful one. Water goes over the grounds in stages, and how you pour shows up in the cup.
AeroPress
The quick one. Steep, press, done. It forgives a lot, which makes it a good place to experiment.
Brew ratio calculator
The first knob I reach for. Pick a dose and a ratio, and it tells you how much water to pour.