 CNET's resident digital audio doyenne, Jasmine France, recently posted an article describing why most headphone reviews are bad. The reasons cited were all based on the overwhelming subjectivity involved. We agree: headphones are a rough review. There are obvious subjective issues like comfort, and less obvious ones such as the fallibility of the human ear and any given person's unique sensitivty to any given frequency. Since our office has less inhabitants than planet Earth, no matter how many people we pass a pair of headphones to, there'll always be some head shape unaccounted for, or someone's aesthetic opinion that goes ignored.
She goes on to mention that sound quality itself is highly subjective. This is also true: if a reviewer has a love of a booming bass and, as such, has less sensitivity to low bass sound frequencies, his or her readers will be steered into buying headache machines. Also, what are the odds that the reviewer is listening to the particular type of music preferred by any given reader? Of course, this is why most savvy consumers read myriad reviews before purchasing. Even still, with something as subjective as sound quality, the only aspect a reader can ever glean from a set of reviews is a general sense of good or bad.
Wait -- hold on a second. What if there were a way to objectively judge headphones. Maybe some way to measure exactly how headphones affect the sounds we play through them? You'd need some kind of sophisticated robot with... microhphone ears! Haha, that would be... very possible now that we think of it. And it could be shaped like a human head and made out of skin-like material: that would account for all the subtle interactions between head and headphone.
 Think of all the graphs we could make with that kind of data! Lots! There could be graphs depicting exactly how much the headphones will boost the bass by, or how much distortion they add, or how good they are at cancelling out ambient noise. And we could post all those graphs on the internet! Why, with that kind of data so readily available, anyone could figure out their own personal sound biases. Then, they could make their own, informed decision about which headphones best suit them!
Just think: a headphone review site less about someone's opinions, and more about providing consumers with information. Headphone information.
...but then what would we call such a website? |
