Jomo Audio interview - expatinjapan






Jomo Audio - In-ear monitors


Check out their instagram for more IEM custom design variations

HP:First of all tell us a little about yourself and the company, present and historical.


Jomo Audio were established in 2015 in the city -state Singapore. It is a very new company in the custom in-ear monitor game. We just had our 1st anniversary in April this year.
I started the company by myself and now we have two directors and 1 technician in our company in Singapore. We have a full-fledged lab with full sets of world-class professional equipment in our Ubi HQ in Singapore. Before Jomo Audio kicked-off, I used to work in the broadcast industry.
I worked a lot with TV stations, Radio Stations.
My customers used to be Mediacorp, Disney Channel, Discovery Channel, etc. During that time, I handled a lot of equipment installation, testing and commissioning in the Downlink site, Head End, Master Control Room, Post Production Studio, Transmission Tower, etc.
A lot hands on experience, I have seen a lot of things and played around with a lot of equipment.


In the late 2012 I started to play around with IEMs. I always love to listen to music and I bought my first “expensive “earphone, the SE 215. I loved it and used it a lot. I listened to it daily with my iPhone, it sounded great. But the engineer nature in me just could not allow me to use any gadget in the normal way, there must be something that I could do to make it better. So I started to do research to improve the fitting, as I always have fitting issue with the universal fit.
 A lot of time was spent on research, and a lot of money spent on tools and material. In the end I managed to make a customized shell from acrylic. But it was ugly and my study room was like an aftermath of a bombing, bottles, tools, dust, everywhere. (I have to thank my wife for allowing me to do this. :P ) Eventually, I cracked the SE 215 and reshelled it into a customized shell. I was amazed! And that engineer nature in me just can’t let things stay still, I kept the research going on.


I started to do research to improve my tools and materials. And from there, I found my partner, a supplier of material for me at that time, from a hearing aid company. I visited his company whenever I had time and learned a lot of new techniques and knowledge about audiology. It helped me a lot and allowed me to improve the build quality. He also introduced me to Knowles, the BA manufacture. I’ve also gathered a lot of useful information and support from them, it has helped me a lot in designing our own IEMs.

A tremendous amount of knowledge and information was gathered from the Internet and I also shared a lot of my experience with others on the internet. I was active on a few forums like Head-Fi, the Earphone and Headphone section on Singapore local forum Hardware Zone. Someone may have seen it; my nickname was“RealSpark”and I still use it up to today. I posted a lot my progress and work. The progress I made attracted a lot of attention. People started to PM me for some small DIY work and in return I would get some coffee money. Things kept going this way for another year and half.

During this period, I came out with a lot of artwork designs to make the IEMs look beautiful. And also I’ve tried to make new IEMs based on balanced armature technology. Again, a lot of time and money spent on research about crossover and all the usual acoustic stuff. By the end of 2014, I had designed 5 different products from Jomo1 to Jomo5. Before I decided to make the hobby more serious, I had already got more than 2 years of experience in making custom IEMs and made more than 100 pairs of IEMs, including reshelled ones. And after some preparation and the Chinese New Year recess, I started Jomo Audio in April 2015 and from there,  we come to where we are today.



HP: Tell us about your custom IEMs.
I designed the Jomo1 to Jomo5 custom IEMs before we went pro.
And at the end of 2015, we released two new models called Jomo6 and Jomo6R.
Clearly the number in the product name is the number of balanced armature drivers used in each model.

Jomo1 to Jomo4 are our entry level custom IEMs.
The Jomo1 uses a single full range balanced armature driver (BA).
The Jomo2 is a step up from Jomo1 with one more bass driver to deliver a fuller sound.
Jomo3 went further on the lower end than the Jomo2 with doubled bass drivers, it gives a very deep bass, recessed mid and clear highs.
The Jomo4 kept the bass and highs from the Jomo3 and improved the vocals and also the overall clarity.

Jomo5 were another big step up from the Jomo4. A single dedicated woofer with two mid-range drivers and two high frequency drivers deliver a very natural sound.
Jomo6 improved the Jomo5 further by replacing the single woofer with a vented dual BA driver, which makes the bass punchier and faster.
Early in 2016, we updated the Jomo6 tuning, changed it to a less V-shaped sound which is more musical.

The Jomo6R is our reference monitor model. It has a very balanced structure with 2 bass, 2
mid and 2 high drivers with a 3 way crossover. During the design period, we consulted some musicians and audiophiles and tried to find out what is the best combination to allow them to hear all the details of the instruments and vocals. The drummer wants to hear his hits but also wants to hear the string scratches from the guitarist, the bassist should hear the tempo but also hear the front man’s vocals, etc.
From their feedback, we made the Jomo6R. It has been well received as a
reference monitor by musicians and also audiophiles who prefer clarity than a warm sound signature.



HP: If you have several products up and coming. Could you tell us a little about them.
Until now, all of our monitors sound is designed by myself. As you know, we all have our preferences of sound. So they are all very good examples of how I think good music should be presented to the listener. But this year I’ve tried many different kinds of sounds with different setups and some of them are pretty unique.
 I’ve made some prototypes to let people to hear and have gotten feedback. It’s like how the control system works, deliver something, get feedback and correct to make the deliverable better. We are working very hard on new product(s).




HP: Tell us a little about any future plans for your company.
We will be focusing on making good handmade custom made in-ear monitors for the next few years although many companies went for 3D printing technology. We still believe that handmade custom IEMs give more options to the customer to make it a real customized IEM. But of course 3D printing technology is in our pipe line for our universal fit models.



HP: Anything else you`d like to add?
Thank you for reaching out to me for this opportunity to introduce Jomo Audio. I also hope you enjoyed the Jomo6R demo for the product review. We will keep up our passion for making good in-ear monitors, we will never stand still.
Please stay tuned for the new up and coming products, they will be great.



HP: Thank you for your time.
Thank you and looking forward to meeting you in person.









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