"To drill that point home another way, what to you would be an ideal mix of qualities for a review video? Educating the reader? Operating as a test score? Entertainment? Serving as buyer's guide? Working as a tech exposé or tutorial? Including a company introduction? Disclosing a designer's goals for a component? Other?"

"First off, I must still remind my viewers that while they assume a one-to-one relationship with me, I have a 1-to-200'000+ relationship with them all. I couldn't possibly speak to individual needs, priorities and incomes of complete strangers. It seems obvious to you and I but some members of my audience hold a far more egoic view that evolves solely around themselves. After that corrective focus, I'd pick from your list entertainment first followed by education, with a mild smattering of tech and company intel mixed in."

"You've heard me say that I trust the intelligence of my audience in how I handle things. How does that apply in your case?"

"A YouTube audience isn't all audiophiles. Many migrate over from other sectors and interests. To be clear, this platform's comments section—not just mine but generally—invites lots of noise. I have a moderator whose only task is to keep the comments civil. I don't have time to do it myself. But it's very clear to me that many posters enjoy talking to other posters about gear. I learnt that the hard way when I turned the comment's section off entirely. Instantly I was bombarded by requests or even demands to resurrect it. So now it's open again. I'm happy to entertain that space for my viewers. Until recently, I've simply not managed to successfully communicate that I put a full 40 hours into every video beyond which still come news posts, emails, research, listening, site maintenance and more to end in 70-hour weeks. I just don't have the time for infantile tantrums. Some predictably retort with 'freedom of speech' and 'censorship' arguments. They conveniently overlook that they've gathered in my virtual lounge room. I've invited them into my online home. They're my guests. Like a restaurant whose owners may refuse service to anyone dressed inappropriately or intoxicated, I have certain criteria for what I tolerate in my crib. Those who can't accept them are free to set up their own channel and say whatever they like. I'm a big believer in free speech. It just doesn't mean that you can be obnoxious about it in my comment's section and leave steaming turds in my front yard. Someone said that when the comments were off, 'it felt like a broadcast'. To which I thought, 'yes, that's exactly what it is'." So I have a complicated relationship with my YouTube audience. I want to maintain a space where reasonable people can dialogue with each other. Having installed a moderator, I'm now entirely hands-off on the subject."

"Whilst we're still on YouTube, at the numbers your hifi channel generates, have their royalties amounted to much to augment the banner income?"

"Between YouTube and Patreon, I cover my rent. In fairness, I didn't take the fastest way to get there and maximize my Google Adsense. For that it's better to go with the Steve Guttenberg approach. Focus on volume so push out as much content as quickly as possible. That's 4-5 videos a week. Don't worry about production values, put an advert at the start, another at the end, one in the middle. That recipe of a large following with volume content plays to the YouTube algorithm and royalty numbers but it's obviously not the route I chose with my Olaf treatment and two days of my own edits. My idea always was that to do luxury products justice on YouTube—nobody needs hifi components so they are a luxury, period—requires more than fast turnarounds and basic presentations. So I'm going about things the slow way. But then I don't work fast to begin with and quality always takes more time."

"Let's talk Patreon. We have the default ad-based publishing model, then the subscription model which online has never gained traction in our space. Pay-per-view might work for MMA but not hifi. Now Patreon offers reader/viewer support. Can you see a time when that covers your full livelihood to step out of the ad-based model altogether? If so, would a purely reader-supported platform even be desirable?"

"When I did Club Nights, invariably a guy would come up to me—it was always a dude, never a gal—and ask me to play a particular song. When I responded that sorry, it didn't fit the mix, mood or crowd, he'd say 'I paid for you at the door so play what I want'. I'd always shut that down immediately and get security involved if necessary. It taught me about the control at stake whenever people assume that they own a piece of me because they paid me something. I never want anyone to hold the key's to John's Kingdom. I prefer a healthy mix of advertisers and Patreon supporters, all of them modest enough to spread the weight around. What I like about Patreon is being essentially a recurring tip jar. The people that put money into it show me that they really value what I do and volunteer to support me in my work. My attitude to that isn't just a thank you and off I go. I want to give them something extra in return. I'm doing a series of videos right now just on Patreon. They won't be accessible to anybody else. I've published special playlists for them and produced other exclusive content all along."

"Aren't you worried about burnout given your current 70-hour week load projected forward into infinity?"

"(Laughs). Sure. I've started to take steps about how many videos I produce. I think I need to make one less each month and Jana is stepping in with her Factory Tour series which we'll run bi-monthly. That buys me an extra week in that particular month. So yes, I have to dial things back a bit to create a sustainable pace. I just can't find another editor. There's nobody who knows hifi and FinalCut and where to make the edits for the exact narrative beats I want. That feeds into the creative process and exercising that part of my brain. I love being creative. It's deeply satisfying. That said, there's only so much deep satisfaction before you work such long hours that things you love start to get annoying. That's when I know to step off the gas."

"Let's delve into the creative process and how that might have refined/changed over time. This could reflect in more polished product; or the journey leading to it being smoother or more effective. What changes have you as a content creator noticed who keeps honing his craft by doing it every day?"

"I've certainly not gotten any faster at it. That I find just a bit frustrating. The other week I wrote what I consider a long-form piece and it took me a full two days. But the more of this I do, the more I realize that I now can do so many more things than I could before. My arsenal of tools has grown. I've gained confidence to branch out into podcasts for example. And if something doesn't work out, it's no big deal. When you start out, failures can quickly lead to stress and visions of your little business crumbling. Today I'm far more relaxed about experimenting and let things drop by the wayside which don't work or warrant the effort. A real benefit of growing experience has been knowing what works and what doesn't. I've gotten better at knowing what I need to cover and how best to convey it. In that sense it's been a time saver. I won't waste time on things that don't matter for how I work, my skill set and my audience."

"I also think that it's ultimately more important to have fun, be enthusiastic and animated than too worried over getting a given sound 110% clinically pegged. After all, it's all subject to ancillaries and room. A good sonic approximation of the qualities most likely to dominate no matter what is far more realistic. So I could never stick to the same tracks for years on end just to insure that I use the same musical references consistently throughout all my reviews. It might be the 'scientifically' most precise way but at what cost to me?"

"Which gets us at measurements. I know exactly why I don't use any. How about you?"

"They don't tell us what anything sounds like, period. What potential buyer goes to a dealer, show or friend with microphone and test kit in their bag? They arrive with CDs, LPs or USB sticks so with the music they know and want to hear. I review components exactly as buyers will use them: with my eyes and ears. Of course manufacturers need measurements to design and run proper QC to guarantee conformity with a golden sample or a base set of spec targets. But listening itself is subjective. Measurements appear to be objective. That's how they give their reviews an aura of the scientific hence unassailable. It nearly puts them beyond discussion until the same component gets reviewed in multiple publications with very disparate measurements. Now what? So much depends on the precise position of the microphone; how well the measuring kit is calibrated; and in the end, on very considerable expertise to interpret a published suite of measurements in any meaningful way. How true would that be for the vast majority of our audiences? How about your reasons?"

"I completely agree with yours. Also, especially frequency-response measurements always get prettified with 1/3rd-octave smoothing. They are never raw graphs. They are beautified lies. Now measurements are a pretense. They pretend at accuracy and truth yet are manipulated to display unrealistic linearity. That false linearity creates the wrong ideas about what's required for satisfying sound. This scientific pretense also obscures the fact that listening is purely subjective. It's something that happens in individual ear/brains. But the scientific lie pretends at some external arbiter of right and wrong. That alienates listeners from any personal confidence in being able to tell what they like and don't like, what sounds right to them and what wrong. That endemic lack of confidence and the corresponding angst which surrounds decision making festers at the heart of so much hifi dis-ease. I decided long ago that consumer measurements aren't helping. They only make this insecurity worse by shifting the decision making onto an exterior authority, be that the measurement or expert. Of course published measurements do lend themselves to posturing. That insinuates a more rigorous approach to the reviewing job than the purely subjectivist chaps. From where I sit, the one thing that a professional reviewer ought to have more than the average consumer is confidence in their own listening ability. It doesn't imply being better listeners though you'd hope so. Fundamentally it only means that we who review for a living ought to trust that we're trained enough to tell what's what without having to rely on corroborating graphs; and that we've set up our work process to minimize mistakes and are willing to admit when we do make the occasional one. In the end, we don't say 'that's what it sounds like, period' like measurements pretend to but utterly fail at. We just say 'that's what it sounded like to me with my hardware, music and room'. It's our personal observations and opinions. They're subjective though based on a lot of accumulated experience. I don't need to hide behind the facade of measurement 'credibility' to be very comfortable saying that this is a subjective business. I never pretend it's more nor do I want my audience to think so. Not publishing measurements makes that point."