One of the privileges that comes with accumulating over 40 pairs of headphones is the ability to compare them to each other. I developed a set of 10 listening tests of features that were important to me. The features that were important to me, that made up the 10 comparison criteria, are:
- Transparency: What is between me and the music? A felt cloth? A "Sennheiser veil?" A frosted window? Dirty window? Clear Saran wrap? or nothing? At its best, makes me forget I am listening on headphones and am in room with musicians.
- Width of sound stage: How far to the left and to the right, (yes, AND up and down in best cases) does it seem the musical sources are arranged?
- Positional resolution: Can I distinguish a difference in position of two singers in Song 1?
- Bass visceral: Does the bass in third verse of Song 4 actually shake me? Or do I just hear it?
- Drum "twang": At start of Song 1, do the bass and tom tom drumhead have a tone and a pitch, rather than just a thump?
- Bass pitch perception: For the complicated bass runs in Song 1, do I hear a pitch with sufficient accuracy to sing or transcribe the part?
- Bass finger pluck: Do I hear the actual impact of fingers on the bass string just before hearing its sound on Song 2?
- Shaker variation: In Song 2, verse 3, do the various shaker shakes sound a bit different from each other, as they should?
- "Ripping" of organ / brass: In Song 3, is there the sensation of hearing each vibration of the French horn and low organ reed tones (sort of the tonal counterpart to hearing a "pitch" from a drumhead in Test 5);
- Discern added chord: About 1:38 into Song 3, after the full orchestra and organ hold a chord at the top of a passage, can I hear a small number of orchestra instruments join in, as sort of an echo, in the second measure of that chord?
Songs that are mentioned in the 10 tests above are:
- "You're Going To Miss Me When I'm Gone," by Band of Heathens, from their album One Foot In The Ether (used for fidelity of drum sound, positional resolution of two vocalists, and ability to discern pitch of string bass passages);
- "Spanish Harlem," by Rebecca Pidgeon, on The Ultimate Demonstration Disc of Chesky records (used to assess female vocals, transparency, the attack of finger on bass string, and high resolution discrimination of differences in shaker shakes);
- "Symphony No. 3 in C Minor Op. 78 (Organ Symphony) - IV" by Camille Saint Saens played by Lorin Maazel and Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra (used to assess the "ripping" sound of well-rendered lower brass and organ reed pipes, and the ability to hear a very small entrance amidst a bombastic chord of orchestra and organ at full tilt);
- "Throwback" by B.o.B. on Underground Luxury (used to assess ability of a bass tone, specifically lowest C on piano at about 32 Hz, to pick me up by the throat and shake me!)
I then conducted 10 tests of three headphones each, in which I ranked the three headphones' ability to perform on each of the criteria. This was a relative ranking, not an absolute.. a headphone with poor transparency but better than the other two of the comparison trio got just as many points as the winner of a different trio of headphones for transparency, even though it might be overall higher. In this way, I got away from subjective "good, OK, poor" results that I feared I could not repeat or combine.
I also put the same headphone in several of the trio rankings, so that someone with more energy than me could try to merge rankings using the common headphones as anchor points.
To repeat, I used what was important to me. What is important to you is different.
I scored the winner of the trio for each test with a 3, the middle one a 2, and the poorest a 1. Then I added up the points of each headphone in the trio across the ten tests. The winner, with the highest point score, got a blue coding, the runner up a red, and the second runner up (third place) a yellow.
Here are the summary results. Each number in every line has a post that stands behind it, telling how that headphone ranked on each of the 10 criteria that went into that score. For example, here is the post that supports the last line of the table, ranking three bass-heavy headphones:
http://www.head-fi.org/t/723136/battle-of-the-bassys-beats-pro-yamaha-pro-500-and-beats-studio-2013-compared#post_10634722
Perhaps even more importantly, accumulating 40+ headphones gave me the opportunity to develop a list of over two dozen excuses as to why I needed a new pair of headphones, even though I had 39 others. You may find some of these battle-tested rationalizations useful in your own household:
http://www.head-fi.org/t/729181/why-i-need-new-headphones-26-battle-tested-excuses-for-your-use#post_10765474
