Happy Lunar New Year everyone! How was your 2025? I thought it was a pretty interesting year. I had a lot of goals in mind for this year but I will likely write that up on a seperate blog post. It's been quite a while since I wrote a TechLog! Honestly, I meant to make this post in January but that month became a bit of a fog orz anyway...

The other day, I got my first pair of IEMS! As you can see above these are a pair of NickHCK DB2. I think it only costed around $20 since I didn't want to start big. I had to replace the stock cable with some KBear cables though since I wanted it to be all blue haha. If you're curious about the sound quality, all I could really say is that it's good for the price. I am unfortunately not so familiar with audio terms to describe its sound. However, I did have to adjust the audio/equalizer settings on my digital audio player to play it the way I liked it. However! I am overall enjoying the IEMs so far :D Also the design is is so pretty!

Stylistically, I think it also pairs really well with my digital audio player! Now I bring these around me everytime I head out.

I bought this FiiO SnowSky Echo Mini off a friend's reccomendation and honestly it has been one of my favourite devices to have. The audio quality is great and the battery life is amazing. This is not a touch-screen device and you would need to use the buttons on the top to play/pause/navigate and such. It's very easy and simple to use. However, if you have a lot of songs/albums, it may take time to manually scroll and navigate over to an album that is near the bottom of the list. There's a few colour schemes you could also customize the UI with and you know how much I love the colour blue!

Apparently, you could also use this device as a DAC when you install the driver but I get reccomended against it because it may shorten the lifespan of the device.

Some people may wonder why I decided to get a music player even though I've been previously playing music off my phone. I thought about it for a bit when I realized I had to get a new phone. Realizing that many modern phones do not have AUX cables and external SD card slots anymore which is ridiculous. I would not have complained about it if those modern phones weren't extra expensive with all those features taken out...

So I thought to myself that maybe it was for the best I seperated the music player from my phone. There is a market out there for people like me who want devices with an aux cable and an external SD card... Not only that, it should help me save more battery off my phone incase of emergencies. I listen to music all the time when I'm out! The convenience of having everything in one phone is great but sometimes I felt like I needed some of that "inconvenience" in my life to feel a little more alive. Though that's also another story.