[thegeezer3]

Hi there everyone,
 
I once visited a wine shop where they had a simple diagram illustrating each wine. Two axis. The horizontal ranging from dry to sweet and the horizontal light bodied to full. They'd show on this one illustration where *all* the wines on the shelf infront of you sat in relation to one another.
 
I found this to be incredible useful as a totally clueless beginner and after sampling several wines from each quadrant i soon realized which area Id like the best. Of course there's a lot more too wine than those 2 attributes but it was a great way to start having some "educated" fun. 
 
How about headpones and sound? I know from the glossary page that there's a lot to sound but if you had to create a similiar system what two *sound* attributes would you choose to aid beginners buying there first set of decent cans (ignoring non sound related things such as cost or build quality) 

 

[castleofargh]

it's not that easy because simple means you will leave out a specs that might be significant sometimes.
for headphones, I guess the signature is the main factor. and we could attempt to rank it from warm to bright. but then in the middle we would have the more neutral stuff sitting right next to the V shaped headphones. 
 
I guess I would go with one axis from warm to bright, and the other axis from smooth frequency variations to spiky frequency response changes.  that might kind of work in general to have the headphones I like showed mostly in the same area.
but I already see one major flaw to this, if the headphone takes a massive dip of 10db between 2 and 3khz, it will not sound as bad as if it's a boost of 10db in the same area.
 
it's a difficult exercise IMO. we could go with distortions, but they don't all sound bad. etc etc.

 

[watchnerd]

Distortion.
 
I have a lot of guests who don't realize how loud they're playing my stereo, which uses electrostatic speakers, because the electrostatic panel has 10x - 100x of the distortion of dynamic speakers and they equate "loud" to distortion.