Hey everyone, I recently released my first collaboration IEM, the DUNU Mirai, so I thought it’d be a fun opportunity to answer some questions about what shaped its development. I’ll also be happy to take questions about anything else pertaining to audio!
How can we trust you as a reviewer when you are actually working so closely with a manufacturer? There is so much conflict of interest here.
While you may not review you IEM, you will be reviewing future iems that is essentially a competitor to your existing collaboration. How can you ensure objectivity when you have a financial stake in this?
This is definitely a question that I was anticipating.The short answer is that you are 100% correct that it’s a conflict of interest. There’s nothing I can do that will change this (short of quitting as a reviewer). But I can do my best to massage some doubts.
Financial motivation is the conflict that most people will point to. And while I usually shy away from talking about personal finances, I have to point out that I don’t review for a living. My content work makes up less than 10% of my total income. That could change, but I don’t have a strong incentive to push sales of my IEM because what I make from my full-time job is enough to sustain myself and dwarfs what I make from reviewing.
More importantly, I’ve also built up a strong reputation for honesty. I see this as a long-term feedback loop, where people keep coming back to my reviews because what they experience is consistent with what I write, or I offer a useful perspective. If I suddenly switched up by panning everything as being worse than Mirai, I would be breaking this trust. It’s difficult to build trust, it’s easy to break it.
On a more sentimental level, the goal behind Mirai wasn’t entirely about turning it into a collaboration to sell to the market. I really just wanted an IEM that I could call my own, with my idea of good sound. But you need resources to build your own IEM, and there needs to be a reciprocal relationship to springboard development, hence why it became a collaboration.
I know there’s an element of “trust me bro” to this response and that I’m very fortunate to be in a position where I don’t need this to be my bread and butter. And of course, collaboration IEMs will always present a conflict of interest. But hopefully this helps to address some concerns!