[james444]

There's a lot of talk about which headphone works best with which musical style buried in the various impressions/appreciation threads. My proposal is to make this information more transparent and comparable by means of standardized polls.

First we would have to agree upon a maximum of 10 musical genres (= limit of poll options) that should cover the whole music range.
For example:
- Classical music
- Folk & Traditional music
- Pop
- Blues
- Country
- Electronic
- Heavy metal
- Hip hop
- Jazz
- Rock

This would be the hardest part. Of course one could combine similar music styles into one option.

The rest would be easy: there would be a poll for a certain headphone, e.g. "IE8: which musical style works best?" and maybe a second "IE8: which musical style works worst?"

This is my proposal. Please tell me what you think of it -thanks!

 

[ljokerl]

You will run into the problem of people who havent owned or even tried the earphone in question voting in the polls for no apparent reason. In addition, since head-fi poll standings can be viewed prior to voting, you have to account for the mob effect.

Oh, and this would only work if you make it a multiple-choice poll (i.e. votes for several genres allowed). Also, I'm sure many people do not listen to all the mentioned genres and some genres are obviously more popular than others, which would skew the tallies.

 

[shigzeo]

I also don't think it will work. While a nice idea, people have different ideas of what sounds good with what. For example, I listen to mostly trance though have been known to listen to some pop, rock, electronic, classical, jazz, hip hop, folk and a whole mess of others.

But, when I listen to the bass-heavy genre of trance, I prefer headphones which are not too bassy and have wide, airy presentations. For rock, I like harder, thicker bass and for rap, a great mid section loaded with liquidy vocals.

The same may not be true for the next person; in fact, i would reckon it is defiantly different. If it were the same, it would be easy to simply plug and play, but then, this site would be much, much smaller.

 

[A_Dying_Wren]

A better list might be earphones which should DEFINITELY not be used for certain genres. The bass-light Etys i imagine would be a substantial problem when play genres like trance, heavy metal and some hip hop.

But again, this differs by person.

An alternative solution would be to nominate songs which particularly well represent a particular or a few particular earphones. For example, for some reason I think clocks by coldplay sounds amazing on my IE8s

 

[shigzeo]

again, i love the er4 for trance except for its too tight stage. fast, transient - almost perfect except a bit bass light. i prefer it greatly to the pfe for the same genre. the echo is much better.