DIY Earbuds

[jeejack]

Honestly the price of a driver does often not correlate with the sound quality. Some cheap drivers are awesome and some expensive ones are not so great at all. My experience so far with the more expensive drivers with high ohmage is that they are very hard to tune compared to the cheaper ones!
Also give the HB1 some more time, I suggest to use it exclusively for a day or two to get adjusted to the dark signature. A dark tuned bad driver will always sound congested and muffled, the better drivers can resolve the low end and the transition area between bass and lower mids much better, so a dark signature can also be wonderfully detailed, enveloping and rich sounding! I believe the driver in your HB1 in fact not to be cheap. If you buy driver, that shell and the cable seperately you might even have to pay more than you did for the assembled bud. So you actually made a good purchase either way!

@jeejack : I might try the 130r bery suggestion you posted. I transplanted th 68r driver elsewhere... So the shell is free and luckily has the mmcx already soldered.
By the way, is there another shop on Aliexpress than XinYue and NSCAudio where we can get supplies like horseshoe foams, cables and stuff?
I am desperately looking for low density horseshoes, and I'd also like to get the Huayunxin ones. I believe all their stuff to be great quality!

I only buy from these three stores. The glue and foam quality from Huayunxin is better.
Make sure that the HS covers the vents shells well and that no air passes through them.
You can check this with your phone's flashlight.

 

[tOMZY]

Honestly the price of a driver does often not correlate with the sound quality. Some cheap drivers are awesome and some expensive ones are not so great at all.

Yes, indeed. The drivers of Tmusic EP3 cost nothing but I really like the final result.

Also give the HB1 some more time, I suggest to use it exclusively for a day or two to get adjusted to the dark signature.

Sure, this was my first impression which might change. The biggest problem is the fit - they are way too small for me. Of course, I could replace the shells

 

[droenald]

I only buy from these three stores. The glue and foam quality from Huayunxin is better.
Make sure that the HS covers the vents shells well and that no air passes through them.
You can check this with your phone's flashlight.

Which Huayunxin store do you buy material from? I cannot find any horseshoe or tuning paper there...
You think a normal horseshoe will work too? Well, no matter - I'll try!
My 300LCP project in MX500 has come to a stop. i cannot find any more treble. I am tuning two identical buds in the mx500 shells with bass tubes. Going from Y3 to Y5 paper changed nothing! The bud with Y3 sounds identical with the one with Y5.
Then I taped close all ventilation holes on the shell on 1bud. And: nearly identical! If something then this bud now has even more bass than the other. The bass tube works stronger there now. The only thing that gave me a little more treble was trimming away the piece of horseshoe in the area on the lower part of the shell, where the horseshoe is "free" in the air.
To be fair this bud sounds already great and is a somewhat darker tuning. "Romantic" sounding with beautiful vocals. It has very deep reaching round bass. The only "problem" is now that I have that the "donkey" build sounds so great I have somewhat lost the interest in improving it.... The driver only reacts to changes of the damping inside the shell and needs very little air which makes me think the 300lcp has to go into a metal shell, where horseshoe is not "mandatory" and the shell can be damped more freely, if I want it to sound brighter...
@tOMZY
No you cannot replace the shell, it will sound very different most likely and not necessarily good. TMusic paired this driver with the shell because it works.
But I understand the problem. I also have a build in this shell and I don't find it comfortable as well. I need a shirt clip and silicone rings for mmcx buds. The idea to pair earbuds with heavy mmcx cables is stupid and destroys the very idea of earbuds. Wearing something light and comfortable in your ears and enjoying music. That's why I love MX500 paired with the cheap, light and good quality RY-shop cables...
Try silicone rings and a shirt clip!

 

[jeejack]

On HB1 the hole on the back of the shell is too big. Remove the grill and apply a filter that is used for IEMs or reduce the diameter of the hole

 

[tOMZY]

The bass tube works stronger there now.

Speaking in general, don't bass tubes make the bass slower juts like in ported subwoofers?

Try silicone rings and a shirt clip!

Tried, silicone rings + foams make the seal too strong. Will have to try very thin foams, could be just what I need.

 

[jeejack]

Which Huayunxin store do you buy material from? I cannot find any horseshoe or tuning paper there...
You think a normal horseshoe will work too? Well, no matter - I'll try!
My 300LCP project in MX500 has come to a stop. i cannot find any more treble. I am tuning two identical buds in the mx500 shells with bass tubes. Going from Y3 to Y5 paper changed nothing! The bud with Y3 sounds identical with the one with Y5.
Then I taped close all ventilation holes on the shell on 1bud. And: nearly identical! If something then this bud now has even more bass than the other. The bass tube works stronger there now. The only thing that gave me a little more treble was trimming away the piece of horseshoe in the area on the lower part of the shell, where the horseshoe is "free" in the air.
To be fair this bud sounds already great and is a somewhat darker tuning. "Romantic" sounding with beautiful vocals. It has very deep reaching round bass. The only "problem" is now that I have that the "donkey" build sounds so great I have somewhat lost the interest in improving it.... The driver only reacts to changes of the damping inside the shell and needs very little air which makes me think the 300lcp has to go into a metal shell, where horseshoe is not "mandatory" and the shell can be damped more freely, if I want it to sound brighter...
@tOMZY
No you cannot replace the shell, it will sound very different most likely and not necessarily good. TMusic paired this driver with the shell because it works.
But I understand the problem. I also have a build in this shell and I don't find it comfortable as well. I need a shirt clip and silicone rings for mmcx buds. The idea to pair earbuds with heavy mmcx cables is stupid and destroys the very idea of earbuds. Wearing something light and comfortable in your ears and enjoying music. That's why I love MX500 paired with the cheap, light and good quality RY-shop cables...
Try silicone rings and a shirt clip!

Here's your 300 LCP.
Y5 (my choice) or Y6.
Again, be very careful how you apply the horseshoe foam (HS) on the shells. Any uncontrolled air leakage will ruin the sound.
Forget about the bass tube in this case (I'll explain to you what you're doing wrong)

 

[droenald]

Speaking in general, don't bass tubes make the bass slower juts like in ported subwoofers?

May be. But the bass tube does not only influence the bass. When closing the basstube with my fingers while listening bass extension gets less, but also soundstage is reduced, and i think there is a little less air. The sound gets a tiny bit "boxy". Btw it is only this driver where it works like this, it does not "care" about the air pressure in the shell. In another bud with tube the sound gets quite a bit brighter because of the higher pressure in the shell.
I don't think the bass gets slower per se. It does get rounder and fuller, and yes, feels slower. I believe that is just the function of having more subbass in this case.
A bassdrum hit will exist of the beater sound which is brighter, and the kettle sound. The lowest frequencies of a bassdrum hit linger the longest and take the longest to decay. Most earbuds have bass rolloff. So we dont hear the decay, making the bass on earbuds very fast sounding in comparison to IEMs. The same concept applies to bass guitar btw. This is why I find IEM bass slow, but I have not heard any planar IEMs, they might actually do good with the "built in" speed of the transducer. But dynamic driver + deep bass extension in IEM is not a combination I like!
Still early bass rolloff in earbuds make for an unrealistic bassdrum sound. So I try to find more bass extension. I consider any frequencies below 50hz as "dirt" which muddies the music. In fact many mixing engineers apply high pass filters to delete the deepest low end from the recording. Anyways, we will not be able to find linear bass down to 50 hz in earbuds, no matter how hard we try. Maybe with filter network for eq built in the earbud, but we'd need to find space for resistors and capacitors...

 

[BCool]

Speaking in general, don't bass tubes make the bass slower juts like in ported subwoofers?

From my limited experience, I don't think so. Or, at least, the effect is not as pronounced. I suspect that this is due to the much smaller volume of air involved maybe because bass tubes in buds work in a fundementally different way than they do in large speakers.

 

[droenald]

From my limited experience, I don't think so. Or, at least, the effect is not as pronounced. I suspect that this is due to the much smaller volume of air involved maybe because bass tubes in buds work in a fundementally different way than they do in large speakers.

Good point! The distance the air has to travel after a deep bass strike and the under-/overpressure this causes in the enclosure are probably very quickly eliminated in such a small enclosure as an earbud!
Never thought about it like this before.

 

[Kellerfloridan]

Those 300 ohm drivers sound cool, excited to see how your build turns out