 We've shown you the lab, my master plan for revolutionizing the testing that backs all of our content. At least, the shell of it. And, we've shown you the person in charge. Hi, Gary. Hi. But, that's only two parts of a much bigger puzzle. And we've already spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on testing equipment. So it's a good thing I'm already on the floor. Ugh! Let's take your journey then, and see exactly who I can introduce you to so far, and what it is that they've been doing. Right after I do tell you about our sponsor. Viewsonic. Their Elite XG321UG Mini LED Monitor offers a 4K native resolution IPS panel with a 144Hz refresh rate. It comes with G-Sync Ultimate R4 and a Quantum Dot Color layer. So it's great for both gamers and creators. Learn more at the link down below. Long-term, our intention is to have an expert for every major field of technology we cover. That'll include mobile phones, displays, TVs, monitors, projectors, PC hardware, audio, pretty much any other category that you have seen on our channels. The script calls for me to talk about our mechanical engineer, Antoine. But instead, we're going to start with Sam. You've been specking out a gauntlet of grueling tests to run headphones, speakers, and microphones through, in order to help our viewers decide which ones they should consider. I mean, I think it's clear from what we've talked about so far, that our intention is not to say definitively, this is THE ONE TO BUY. Because it's a very personal choice. But there are certain things that can be absolutely quantified. We've got frequency response tests, distortion tests, isolation tests, leakage tests, and more. What are you working on right now? So in terms of update, I can tell you that we have placed the order for the head simulator, Bianca 5128, and also for the audio precision 517 testing system. Because the equipment hasn't arrived yet, I've been looking at all of the frequency response measurements that I have done on humans on a bunch of headphones. And I have something interesting to show you in terms of the headphones that have noise canceling. Do you want to see it? Yes, I would like that very much. This is really cool. I feel cool. A lot of people don't know that with closed-back headphones, having an airtight seal between the earcups, it's critical for delivering a lot of bass. And if you have glasses on or an LTT store hat, LTTstore.com, gotta pay these guys. Or LTTstore beanie, Sure. You're going to break the seal between the earcups and your ear, and you're going to get a drop-in bass. However, noise canceling headphones use the microphones inside the earcups to listen for how much bass you're hearing, and they compensate for the drop-in bass. No way. So you've actually recorded this. It should be noted that the measurements here are normalized. So even though the baseline looks flat, the actual measurement wasn't flat. I'm just making it flat so it's easier to compare. We're looking at relative. Yes. This is the frequency response of the QC35 in the bass range up to 4000 Hz, without glasses, without a beanie, without a hat. When I add glasses with noise canceling off, you see a little bit of drop-in bass. So about 3 dB, 2 dB of drop-in bass. Right, which sucks. Yeah. That's significant. If you're listening to games or bass heavy music, you're going to notice that. Or you'll just think your headphones suck or the audio in this game sucks. My headphone doesn't have enough bass, even though the measurement shows that it has actually enough bass. If you use a hat, you get even more drop-in bass. Whoa! I thought you said hats were good. You just made me spend $40,000 on a hat. Different hats. Ay! Now, if you add a beanie, which you use when you're recording the Vanshow, this is the amount of drop-in bass that you get. It's about... I knew my voice wasn't that high pitched when I'm monitoring. Almost 14 dB of drop-in bass at 100 Hz. But... When we turn noise canceling on, this is what we get. Again, this is the bass line. This is the measurement on me without glasses or hats or a beanie. This is with glasses on. Whoa! So compared to the old measurements where we lost like 3 dB of bass, here we lose only maybe a dB or a half a dB. With a hat on, again, we're getting maybe only 1 dB, 1.5 dB. And if I put on a beanie, we're getting maximum like 4 or 5 dB of drop-in bass. But with noise canceling off, it was 14 dB of drop-in bass. That is wild! So if you have a noise canceling headphone and you want to make sure that you're getting a good amount of bass all the time, turn noise canceling on. This doesn't happen with all the noise canceling headphones, but the better ones from Sony, from Bose, from Apple, they all do this. So if you want to make sure that you're getting enough bass with your headphones, turn the noise canceling on. Cool. Antoine, meanwhile, has done all kinds of other cool things here, including actually designing the desk made of radiators. Though I think he was still on probation when we did that video, so we weren't able to credit him properly. But hey, we made up for it now. You've got a lot of stuff going on here. First of all, you stole our high-speed camera. So we haven't had that for a production lately. And I think you have a demo to show off today as well. It's a robot, right? I have a few. NVIDIA makes their own latency tester. Why do we need that? Oh, wait, what have you done here? You've got a metal key cap on here, it looks like. No, you've just got copper foil tape on it. And you've soldered a bunch of stuff to it. What on earth are you doing, sir? The LED is meant for mice, not for keyboards. Yes. So I kind of... So you didn't care about that at all, and you made it for keyboards. Exactly. Antoine is our keyboard testing specialist. Press the key for me. Uh-huh. Do I have to do it? Whoa! Hi! Whoa, okay! It's so aggressive. Wow, yeah. Does it have to hit it that hard? It's to minimize the impact of the travel of the key. I think you're maximizing the impact on the travel of the......pun intended. What's the point of this? Surely every keyboard is fast enough. Are they? Okay. That's fair enough, isn't it? Actually, they might be. But what I think we can all agree on is that keyboards have not necessarily reached peak feel. How do we quantify that? Meet... What do you call this thing? The keystroke tester. The keystroke tester, I have it there, an actuation force analysis machine. We'll figure out a cool name for it later. It might not look like much, but it's really cool. This piece right here is a force-load cell, and it can measure to a resolution of 0.001 Newtons. That is one tenth of a gram of force. And, ho-ho, there's a lot more to it than that. I mean, we could theoretically just grab this thing and like, meh, meh, meh, go like this along every string, single key. But that would be madness. We would need an army of Antwans to test the... What is it we're planning to get through the lab? Like 200 plus keyboards by the end of the year? With the help of Guy Fawkes over here, we've created a machine vision system that will automatically detect the edges of the keys, and then direct our XY axis. What? This was just like ripped out of a 3D printer or something? Yes. Yeah, Prusa. Nice. That will direct our force-load tester and move and press each of the keys in turn many times, which is where actually he and the rest of the development team are going to be working on the backend, frontend, and software tools that we're going to need to actually log all this data. Now, from a software standpoint, it occurs to me that not every thing on a keyboard can be pressed down, like this dial, for example, Guy. Is it just going to push the force-load tester against it and go, eh, no, that doesn't work, or? No, before every test run, we have a UI that allows Antoine or whatever other tester is going to be doing the test to actually remove or isolate those options. Cool. Okay. I think that's pretty much it. Can we run it? Yeah, sure. Let's go ahead. This is pretty cool. This is just a cheap photography box, and this is to ensure consistent lighting from all angles so that our cheap webcam, well, expensive webcam, cheap camera, can see all of the edges really well. How do we account for, like, all the different legends that you might find on the keys and all that kind of crap? Once each key is pressed, we're going to get the signal into the machine to say this was the key that was pressed. So we don't actually need to read the keys off the top. We just need to detect the individual keycaps. Show me the money. Lots of money. Oh my God, it's so slow. It's a prototype. Prototype. Okay. Fair enough. Is the aim to pay respects here to my wallet? Right now, I'm sure our goal is to hit the center of the key. But in the long term, could we test the variability from corner to corner to corner to corner to center? Yes, we could. Cool. Now that would be really cool because that's one of the things that really changes the feel of a keyboard, particularly on something like a laptop where you've got a scissor switch. You can have a laptop keyboard that uses a low-end switch technology, but feels great because the stabilization of the keys is excellent. And then you can have one that feels like crap, even though it has a mechanical switch, because the stabilization sucks. Because we're not perfectly accurate. We don't hit the center of the key every time we're typing. Oh my God, it's testing only the second key now. We're going to need an army of these things and an army of Antoine's. How about a robot arm? That looks really expensive. If any robot manufacturers want to reach out and they want to work with us, maybe we can figure something out. That would obviously be a much better way of doing it than what we have now. And I'm told you have more. Yes, I do. What is this? It looks aggressive if it's anything like that. Whoa, hi. No, it's fine. So the goal of that guy is to test the wear on keycaps to compare ABS against PBT double shots. So these are basically little fake fingers. Yes. Fascinating. The idea is to have some fake oil instead of them to test as well. And just wait until we get this guy going on mice and other input devices. It's going to be lots of fun. And do you do what exactly? Oh, I have no idea, but I learned PowerPoint today. Uh-huh. I know. I did not have time to do a demo. I promise you he's doing stuff. He's working through the incredible backlog of applications because as you guys may or may not have noticed, not all of our key product categories are covered yet. What we do have though, let's go have a look at that. That's where Fallout guy comes in here. He's our first full-time software engineer and he is already making a huge difference to our workflow. The thing is you guys probably think, yeah, you guys play with all the latest tech, but you would be blown away by the number of things that we turn away because of how manual our test procedures have been up until now. So his job and the rest of the team that we're going to build out is to make things as automated as possible. We then need to be able to take those results and turn that into information that we can quickly and easily present in our videos, as well as in an online database that anyone can access. Why don't you show us what you've been working on? Instead of having to launch a game and babysit a benchmark yourself and with the push of a button, the way we go. Now, what is happening here? Is this just basically glorified auto hotkey or like what am I looking at? Some parts are, but some games have menus that are not navigable via keyboard. So we're also using computer vision here as well to identify some buttons. Interesting. And will we use computer vision to identify what our ideal settings are so that we can have it configure it to whatever it's supposed to be? Or how does that work? We can do that. However, changing the settings is actually a lot easier to do if you just manipulate the files underneath. Got it. Now, I know it's not implemented yet, but our goal in the long term would be to also use machine vision to identify any kind of artifacting or visual anomalies in the picture. Is that correct? Yep. That's something we are able to do. When? Very good question. I'll hand it out to the other software engineer. And it's done. To be clear, it's not that much today, but this foundation is going to allow us to rapidly scale not only how many tests were able to run, but what kinds of tests were able to run and on what products. This is going to be the backbone that the entire lab runs off of, and it's going to be epic. Wait a second. So you're saying that, you know, once it works better than the load tester, we don't even need to make graphs anymore. Like it'll just spit everything out, ready to go? Just about. It'll save them the time. Okay. I mean, does it do that yet? Where does the data go? What's it? How does that work? What data points? How does it read the results even? So it spits out rings of CSV files, which then we parse and send into a database. Which is great, but I'm about to show you something cooler. Antoine whipped this up in his spare time. You know, Gary tried to take the credit for this, right? But he inspired you. I mean, he has nothing else. He has nothing else to his name. So he's got to he's got to kind of weasel in there. Just kidding. Antoine. This was a completely an Antoine initiative and it looks like progress has been made. It's really cool. We're just not sure how much we like needed it. So why don't you show us what you made? So basically the future of the lab. This was all done in Unreal Engine 5, meaning that it is basically a game level of what it will be like to walk through lab 2. The front door. It's amazing. I still can't believe you did this. This will be the non LTT writers downstairs. Take us to the server room. Nice. Where's the server? Yeah, where's the server? It's coming. What the heck Antoine? It's going. Yeah. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. You really don't need that. Absolutely. And then what's here? Is this the lunch room or? Lunch room, meeting room, whatever. Yeah, cool. Show me the aquarium. I want to go to the aquarium. You told them they were upstairs. No, I removed the one upstairs. I'm working on it. Oh, interesting. Okay. That's my office. I'm apparently an open concept kind of boss now. That's fine. I'm into it. Jake, where's your desk going to be? Somewhere somewhere there right here. Oh, I can't. That's where Luke goes. And then this is the aquarium. So Gary, this is where you're going to sit. Thank you. You're welcome. Make PowerPoints in there. Logistics is going to move over to Lad2 since that's where pretty much every product that crosses our threshold is going to arrive first. A lab will test it, tell us if it's good or if it's crap, and then it will be sent to LTT or short circuit or maybe sent nowhere because it sucks. That's a very real possibility. So that's why logistics needs to move here and we're going to use logistics area, which is actually right below us for, I don't know, more sets or something along those lines. Okay, everybody's workstations. And then this is the testing area. So like CPU bench, GPU bench. We wouldn't do any displays here or anything like that. I wouldn't think, would we? Not necessarily. Some of the tests. Some tests here. Okay. There's obviously some optimizations we could make to the layout. For example, if we wanted to test laptop battery life, having like a nice little rack where you can pack them in nice and tight would be a huge advantage. Is this, oh, is this your work area? Did you take us right to your desk? Yes. I love it. Okay. So you've got your... Do you reconnect that? Yeah. Yeah. The keyboard tester. Do you have the Unreal Engine on your computer in the Unreal Engine? And what am I looking at here? So this is for the first room that is for deep to use with the smartphones. Smartphones. Okay. We've got some really cool smartphone testing coming. It turns out there's all kinds of tomfoolery that goes on in the smartphone industry around like fake reporting, 5G connectivity and all kinds of cool stuff that we're going to be able to dig into in there. I think this is the first big check that you signed. Oh, is it? Actually, that's the second big check. Where's the power supply tester? It's not going to fly down that's all. It will be over. It'll look a little something like that cost over a hundred thousand US dollars, but it'll allow us to analyze every aspect of a computer power supply. And then this is a theater room, right? Yes. We can do projectors in there. We can do speakers. Just anything that you need a larger space for is going to happen in here. Later on the line, we'll be able to touch later the thermal chamber. Thermal chamber. Freaking exciting. Just like this message from our sponsor. Privacy.com. Privacy.com lets you buy things online using virtual credit cards rather than your real ones. Any summer birthdays coming up, keep your identity and baking info safe on the internet while you're shopping for presents. You can set spend limits, pause and close cards at any time. Are you a victim of a fraudulent transaction? 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