By Our Headphones Shall Ye Know Us
While I am still trying to figure out how I rank my own headphones, I took a bit of time to analyze the most recent data on this thread.
I looked at the data for the past 4 months, which includes 1027 statements of headphone ranking. I am using this as a small data set to eventually analyze a much larger portion of the data, time permitting.
The analysis includes rank orders posted from Nov. 22, 2013 through April 24, 2014. These postings included:
- 1027 headphones;
- 154 headphone owners (that averages to 6-2/3 headphones per owner, at least 3x the number of bathtubs per owner -- do we have a lot of unwashed listeners?!!
- 548 different headphone models.
With 548 headphone models and 1027 headphones, there are a lot of headphone models that only a few folks have... for example, 397 headphone models are listed by only 1 person, and 122 models are listed by two to five persons. Hence, 519 headphone models are listed by less than 1/2 % of our post authors in that time segment.
Looking at the
most frequently listed headphones, here are the headphones held by at least 1% of the folks in the sample (i.e. 10 or more people had these):
Headphones Owned by More than 1% of Rank Order Posters | |
|---|
Model | % |
| Sennheiser HD 800 | 2.5 |
| Sennheiser HD 600 | 2.3 |
| Sennheiser HD 650 | 2.3 |
| Audeze LCD-2.2 | 1.4 |
| Beyerdynamic T 1 | 1.4 |
| Koss PortaPro | 1.3 |
| Sennheiser HD 598 | 1.3 |
| Fostex TH600 | 1.2 |
| HiFiMan HE-400 | 1.2 |
| AKG K550 | 1.1 |
| HiFiMAN HE-500 | 1.1 |
| Audio-Technica ATH-M50 | 1.0 |
Each of these headphones was listed by multiple owners as part of a rank order list. One can compute a relative position of a headphone on a rank order list... for example a Sennheiser HD 800 listed at the top of a list of three might be in a relative position of 0.33, i.e., 33% into the list. If another person listed that headphone as second in a list of 6, it would be at a normalized position of .33 on that list as well. In this manner, lists can be combined that rank various numbers of headphones.
With at least 10 lists that rank each of these most-commonly-used headphones, we can compute a rank position (closer to 0 if ranked high; closer to 1 if ranked low) as well as a standard deviation. Here are the same headphones, ranked from "best" scoring (lowest) on down, with standard deviation:
Most Popular Headphones, Scored Best-to-Worst by Rank Position, with Standard Deviation
Model | Rank | Std (+/-) |
| Sennheiser HD 800 | 0.29 | 0.21 |
| Beyerdynamic T 1 | 0.38 | 0.18 |
| Audeze LCD-2.2 | 0.41 | 0.29 |
| HiFiMan HE-500 | 0.44 | 0.24 |
| Sennheiser HD 598 | 0.45 | 0.22 |
| Fostex TH600 | 0.46 | 0.17 |
| Sennheiser HD 600 | 0.48 | 0.31 |
| Sennheiser HD 650 | 0.50 | 0.26 |
| AKG K550 | 0.50 | 0.23 |
| HiFiMAN HE-400 | 0.59 | 0.27 |
| Audio-Technica ATH-M50 | 0.62 | 0.33 |
| Koss PortaPro | 0.77 | 0.26 |
This same information can be presented graphically, ordered from left to right by increasing position down the rank order list:
Rank Order Position, with Standard Deviation, of The Most Popular Headphones
What is most useful, and I've not yet computed, is how a particular headphone of interest compares to other specific headphones, as ranked by the folks on this thread. If I am considering a Sennheiser HD 800 (which I am!), what headphones do folks rank ahead of it? Equal to it? Below it? Are there any correlation of a person's ranking of a Sennheiser HD 800 with how they rank other headphones... for example, if they like bass headphones and have ranked Beats Pro relatively higher than most, do they tend to rank HD 800s lower (if indeed there ARE enough people that have both!?)
Ideally, my work here will result in a spreadsheet that I can post for all to use that allows one to dial in a headphone of interest and retrieve other headphones compared to that headphone of interest, how they compared, and perhaps even who made the comparison, to allow a note to that person to be sent ("@DrDre, why did you rank the Beats Pro above the Sennheiser HD 800?")
As I work further back into the data, the number of headphone models that have enough users to have useful statistical rankings will increase and such comparisons will be possible on more headphone types.
OK... back to data entry!
