I love lap swimming in the pool. It's great exercise. Oh my god.
I love lap swimming in the pool. It is great exercise.
Well, if you're a runner or a cyclist or you go to the gym,
you know that forgetting your headphones totally sucks. So I did what a lot of people do and I
popped over to Amazon where I found out there are a lot of solutions to my problem.
We're going to take a look at some of those today, but once I ventured off Amazon,
I discovered that underwater audio is a whole underwater rabbit hole. See,
listening to music beneath the surface, it's not as simple as you might think. I mean,
just like in the air, sound is a wave and it can travel through water. In fact,
faster and further due to water molecules being packed more densely than air.
But there are some problems. See, high frequencies basically don't go anywhere.
Low frequencies go extremely far and the surface of the water can act as a reflector,
meaning that if you do it wrong, you could be swimming around in an acoustic house of mirrors.
So you can't just take a waterproof speaker, hook it into the pool and expect it to sound good.
And that's even ignoring the obvious Bluetooth connectivity issues.
On top of all that, humans evolved to hear above the surface of the aquatic zone,
so the best underwater audio solutions have to take a lot of factors into account.
Thankfully, my leap into the hydroacoustic pool led me to Renzo, who makes custom professional
underwater audio solutions, along with a host of other very interesting things.
And he happens to be local to us, which means I needed to come here myself to find out which
method of listening to music underwater would be the best while I swim my laps. But please,
be honest with me, are any of these any good? Some of them. Some of them. Yes. Okay. Why do you
make bad ones? No, the ones I make are all good. Ah, yes, I see. Oh, perfect. I was talking about
the underwater speaker part of it. Great. That means my last question for you is, will you help
me segue? Of course. To our sponsor. This place is incredible, but from what I understand,
it didn't always belong to you, did it? No, no. So why do you have this? Well, it's a long story,
but my daughter wanted to do the synchronized swimming. That does sound like a long story.
Yes. I needed somebody to cut pieces to make a sound system so that the coaches could work.
But when you got this, it was just one three-axis CNC. Yeah, that the guy didn't even know how to
use. Okay, you've got so much more than that now. Like this four-axis looks freaking incredible. What
can you make on this? We do 3D sculptures. We do columns. We do piddlers. Okay, but why? For the film
industry. Oh, okay. Well, where have I seen your work then? We've done skyscraper. We've done World
of Warcraft. We've done Percy Jackson. We've done playing with fire. I have a list of different
shows that we've done. This desk must have cost a fortune. Caused me nothing except sweat and tears.
Looks awesome. Let's get to the audio solutions. And here it is, an underwater speaker, which
we are actually going to get to after just one more side quest. Oh my goodness, Renzo, what is this?
Those are some very high-end turntables. This is beautiful. What kind of wood is that? It's a veneer.
It's a black walnut burrow. Affordable, right? Very affordable. They start at about $10,000 US.
That's before you add a tone ARM and a needle. So before they make any sound, you're off 10 grand.
But these are people that spend half a million dollars on their sound systems.
Sure. You need one? No. I suspect that's going to make the underwater audio solution sound
downright affordable. What am I holding right now? That's the soul of the underwater system.
It's a piezoelectric transducer encased in epoxy resin. Right, because unlike a normal speaker,
you wouldn't actually want to see the cone, which would vibrate the air. You actually have to vibrate
this entire heavy mass in order to pass that along to the water? Or am I missing something?
No, no. There's actually very little vibration. You don't see it moving, actually. There's not
like a speaker cone that moves. Now, I see you've actually got two different ones here. This is a
skinnier one? Yes. This is the US model, the DRS-8, and this is the DRS-8 II. The reason for that is
because the Canadian laws only allow a certain voltage, so they put transformers inside the
speaker. Whereas this one goes straight to high voltage? Straight to high voltage. Okay.
It's not going to kill you. It's very little voltage. It's just speaker line voltage. Freedom.
Okay, I'm ready. Go for it.
It's not loud. It doesn't have to be. Whales are not loud, but you can hear them from one ocean to the
other. The clarity is surprisingly good. I mean, I don't know what I was expecting, but
not for it to be pretty decent. No, that doesn't sound decent. You take that. That sounds horrible.
I mean, it's decent enough. It's like a kind of coke. My expectations were extremely low. For
context, the solution that these are replacing was literally a coach grabbing their keys when the
underwater speaker doesn't work and just wrapping them against the side of the pool. So I thought
the bar was extremely low. The part I don't get, though, is those seem pretty bulletproof. So why
did the systems fail so often? Well, that's only part of the equation. Those I've had for 14 years,
and I've never seen one fail. Right. But you need to power them. So you need an amplifier,
you need a preamp, they have microphones, they have, you need a source of sound. You need an
enclosure. You need an enclosure. The enclosure is the magic of it, because it keeps everything
from getting corroded with the pool air. Got it. And that is the special sauce that you've created.
That's correct. And you provide these to, who, I mean, is the market for synchronized swimming
speakers pretty big or small or medium? It's big. There's tons of clubs. And so the coach can not
only play music, but can also use this to communicate to the swimmers under the water.
That's correct. So cool. I cannot wait to try it. Let's go do it.
The rope is so it stays at about three feet underwater.
And then you just plug in your sound source, turn it on, and away you go.
To get started, I'm going to need a few things. First, a pool. Check. Second, an
ocean ear speaker with accompanying transformer. Check. Third, a Renzo to act as DJ for us.
Big check there. And there's one more thing I'm forgetting. Ah, yes. A way to bring you guys
along with us for the journey. This is the Soundfish 2 Mark II from Ambient Recording,
and it's a hydrophone. Yes. It's not the most expensive one we could have gotten, but it's
decent. Yeah, it's supposed to be a pretty good one. Okay. This is a big moment. I have not heard
this yet. Okay. Hit it, Renzo. Okay. Above water. It sounds like it did in the shop. A little tinny.
Okay. That's pretty cool. Obviously, it's not going to be competitive with a high fidelity
speaker setup up here on the surface, but like, dude, you can hear it too, right? Yep. It's not
very good. Like that was very listen toable. Of course, just because I can hear it when I'm
stationary doesn't mean that it's actually going to be that great. Like I kind of do a quick
lap swim before we compare it to something else. Because one of my big concerns is that
at least one ear is going to be constantly coming out of the water when you come up to breathe,
right?
Okay. Couple things right out of the gate. First up, even though I knew this was supposed to
happen, I was surprised at how consistent the volume was throughout the pool, no matter how far
away I got from the speaker. The parts I didn't expect though were when I got to the other side,
it kind of started to sound like it was coming from a different origin, like it was coming out of
that corner of the pool. Then finally, I was really impressed at how quickly, once my ear is submerged,
it just sounded like it's supposed to sound underwater. I thought that like having a little
air bubble in my ear or something would make it sound really different, but it doesn't. It's still
not the most high-fi thing I've ever heard in my life, but very usable. You can actually see
how little it's moving. Like on a normal speaker, you know, you would see the water like
freaking moving around like this, but look, it's barely moving at all. I noticed that even though,
you know, low frequencies travel best in water, I'm really not getting that much bass out of it.
What's the deal with that? Yeah, it's just the nature of the transducer. It's not designed to
produce really low frequencies. There is a brand of speakers that supposedly does that,
but I've never tried them. All right, crank it, Renzo. Dude, that's so weird. That sounds like it's
coming from like over there somewhere. Okay, okay, let's see what happens when we go under.
That is really cool, but it isn't the only solution. And this is one of the most popular
bone conduction headphones. These are the shock's open swim pros. I have to confess,
I have never actually tried bone conduction swimming headphones. It's very much a personal
preference thing. I do not like them. Oh, these are already on. Yeah. And you can feel them vibrate.
It's weird. But you can't hear them basically at all. No. Like here, check this out.
When I put them on my ears. Whoa. Okay, that's pretty cool too. If you haven't heard of bone
conduction headphones before, basically how they work is instead of vibrating your eardrums,
it vibrates the bone in your face, which then vibrates your cochlea directly, bypassing most of
your ear. Cool. On ear controls for power and volume. And I guess they just have an mp3 player
built into them because otherwise how do they pair to something outside of the water? These ones,
that's the big upgrade of this year is they can compare to your phone via Bluetooth, but they
also have storage inside. So you can upload music to them directly and control it that way.
The downside is you can't control that music via the app. You have to plug it into a computer.
Okay. I mean, it's fine. So iPod grade technology. All right, let's go first one.
Already I can tell that your experience with these is going to be heavily dependent on how
well they fit you because depending on exactly where I get the vibrating pieces,
they sound either kind of okay or like absolute hot garbage.
I'm also surprised at how more different these sound above and below the water compared to
the underwater speakers. I would have assumed above and below would be the same because it's
right against your bone. As soon as I go underwater, here, try them. They sound like hyper bassy.
Huh. Nice. Trick shot. We interrupt this fun video to show off the big Hexie beach towel from
lttstore.com. It's big. It's orange. It's a best of gone. Get yours today.
I already think they're too bassy as is. Below the water is really bad. You can EQ it probably.
Maybe a little and to be clear, they're fine for listening to music and honestly,
not really much worse than the ocean ears. No. It's just the inconsistency and obviously,
for an application like synchronized swimming, this is useless because how would you get everyone
perfectly in sync? You have to be all listening to the same source. This isn't our only solution,
though, right? No, there's lots of other bone connection headphones, but maybe that's this
kind of thing we should do in a roundup. Yeah, let us know if you want to see that in the future.
Leave a comment down below. Yeah, with the headphones you'd want us to cover. But we do have one more thing to try today. And it's the worst one.
Oh no. Actually, wait, there's one more thing I want to try. Do we have the underwater mic?
I want to see if it can hear these. Okay, okay. Here it is above water.
Can you hear it? I can hear it a tiny bit. Not much. Okay, okay. That's it. I was just curious.
That bit at the beginning was only kind of a joke. We have the Monster S620,
which is an IPX8 rated speakers, which means it's actually submersible up to a certain degree.
And it's a pretty okay Bluetooth speaker. Let's see how it does underwater.
Geez. Oh, well, this is terrific. It's all the downsides of absolutely everything we've
tried so far. Bluetooth connectivity issues whenever it's underwater.
And ask garbage sound quality to be clear. Monster never claimed that this was an
appropriate solution for listening to music underwater. They're just saying that this speaker
won't die if you accidentally drop it in the pool and it goes underwater. In fact,
they even designed it to make sure that it doesn't go too far into the water by making it float. So
good job, Monster, I guess. Just not a solution to the problem we're trying to solve today.
You know what is a solution to our problem today, though? Our sponsor. If you guys enjoyed
this video, we're going to have Renzo and Jeanette sites linked down below. You guys can go check
them out. It was extremely gracious of them to show us around their shop and lend us these
incredible products to try out. If you guys can think of any other esoteric technologies, by the
way, that, you know, we wouldn't normally think to cover, leave a comment down below. And if you
guys enjoyed this video, why not check out the one where we built a home theater in my pool? Kind
of worked.