With some luck I'll have dragged a few of the more "sciency" head-fi'ers in with the title for this post.
I want to propose a project to the more scientifically inclined crowd on head-fi, the "absolute fidelity index" project, as I'm calling it for now. I'm kind of frustrated that when I'm looking for a new pair of headphones, I need to read highly subjective reviews on what various people think of the sound quality of the headphones, in order to determine which one is probably the best at a given price range. This shouldn't need to be the case, there are objective ways to measure the absolute fidelity of a piece of audio equipment, there is nothing in sound that can't be measured. What I'm proposing, as most of you have probably already guessed, is that we objectively measure, with a percentage, how close the electrical impulses or sound waves produced by a piece of audio gear are. I'd like a few people to respond agreeing that they'd be interested in participating before I type out the full description of how we'd be doing this. Anybody have some good meters and the time to figure out how close the sound reproduced by a pair of cans replicates the electrical impulses from an amp?