Engineering sound from first principles
Edward Design Labs is a personal audio engineering practice founded in high school, born from a childhood spent among flagship equipment, years of hands-on modification, and an obsession with understanding why tuning remains one of the hardest unsolved problems in audio.
Where it started
My grandmother was a dedicated audiophile. From childhood I had access to cutting-edge equipment that had been the flagship of her generation — weekly visits to listen through her prized McIntosh Laboratory MC2600 amplifier and massive B&W Matrix loudspeakers. Those sessions were serious listening, not background noise. That early exposure planted something that never left.
Music has been a safe haven for as long as I can remember. House, bossa nova, classical, vocal jazz, electronic — I never settled into one corner of it. Each genre demands something different from a playback chain, and chasing that difference became its own education. You hear things differently when you care deeply about what you're listening to.
Years later, as a teenager, I had my own soldering station, copper wire, cheap dynamic drivers, and a 3D printer. For over two years I developed custom 3D-printed in-ear monitors and open earphones, upgraded an iPod Classic battery, and replaced every capacitor in a 1970 Pioneer amplifier. Audio was never a single project. It was a continuous workshop.
During that same period I bought and sold over 100 headphones and IEMs — not to flip gear, but to listen. Every purchase was a question: what does this signature get right, and what does it trade away? A Harman-tuned IEM sounds nothing like a diffuse-field neutral planar. A warm dynamic driver tells you something different about a Bill Evans recording than a bright BA stack does. Working through that many transducers across that many genres gave me a reference library that no amount of reading could replicate.
I also ran a YouTube channel during this time focused on helping people repair and upgrade their own audio equipment. Recapping vintage receivers, diagnosing failed driver channels, rewiring headphone cables. The goal was practical: most audio problems are fixable if you understand what you're looking at, and the barrier to entry is lower than the hobby culture suggests.
Edward Design Labs
I founded Edward Design Labs in high school to turn that obsession into structured work. The focus was modification and improvement of existing products — not rebranding, but re-engineering what was already on the market to sound better and last longer.
Monolith M1060 — driver and damping modifications to improve tonal balance and reduce resonance. Fostex TRP-50 — acoustic tuning and structural refinements. KSC35 — cable system redesign with detachable terminations. Stax electrostatic energizers — internal modifications for cleaner bias and improved reliability.
Across dozens of projects, a common thread emerged: the hardest part was never soldering or CAD. It was tuning. Even large manufacturers and niche houses like Empire Ears and Audeze wrestle with it, because acoustic behavior is extraordinarily variable and rarely forgiving.
The tuning problem
With limited commercial materials — foam pads, fiberglass, cotton — shaping a driver's output into something musically coherent was always a challenge. One aspect that kept surfacing in my own builds was driver-induced vibration: unwanted interference caused by the physical movement of a sound-producing unit coupling into its enclosure.
When a dynamic driver oscillates, it exerts force on its cabinet. If that cabinet's natural resonant frequency aligns with what the driver is producing, the enclosure vibrates along with the diaphragm. The result is coloration— layered resonance that masks detail and shifts the original signal. For rigid materials like resin or MDF, this is primarily a low-to-mid frequency problem. Above roughly 1,200 Hz, most enclosures simply do not flex enough to resonate meaningfully.
Cabinet acoustics research
To study this systematically, I designed and built a 3D-printed speaker chamber from UV-curing resin and ran a controlled experiment on how damping material density affects frequency response. Using a calibrated MiniDSP UMIK-1 microphone, Room EQ Wizard, and a reference playback chain, I measured sound pressure levels at 50 Hz and 5,000 Hz across six packing densities.
The data supported a clear split: increasing cotton packing density produced a strong, linear rise in measured loudness at 50 Hz, while 5,000 Hz measurements showed no meaningful trend. Resin's stiffness limited resonant behavior to the low end, exactly as predicted. The takeaway was practical: for rigid SLA-printed enclosures, now used by companies like Ultimate Ears for IEM shells, damping is a viable lever for low-to-mid tuning. Above the enclosure's resonant ceiling, crossover design and driver selection matter more.
What Edward Design Labs stands for
Edward Design Labs is not a mass-market brand. It is a workshop philosophy: start with what exists, measure what matters, and improve it with evidence rather than marketing. Whether modifying a planar magnetic headphone, redesigning a cable system, or printing a custom enclosure from resin, the goal is the same — sound that is transparent, detailed, and honest to the recording.
Audio engineering called early. The work continues.