Send us the headphone.
We’ll send you back the data.

What we will and won’t publish

The honest part first, because it is the whole point: we publish what the rig says, flattering or not. If that is not a deal you want, this is the right moment to say no, and no hard feelings — a measurement that came with conditions would not be worth anything to your customers or to us.

What we will publish is a frequency response, the fixture it was measured on, the seating procedure, how repeatable that seating was, and where the measurement stops being trustworthy.What we won’t publish is a rank, a score, or a subjective verdict. We are not a review outlet and we don’t audition products against each other for sport.

We also say the obvious thing on every page, before anyone else has to: one unit is one unit, not the model. A single measurement of a single sample is exactly that, and pretending otherwise is how measurement gets a bad name.

You can read the method before you decide

This is the part we think is genuinely different. Our measurement method is written down and published before anything gets measured, so you can read exactly how your headphone will be treated and decide with the facts in front of you rather than hoping.

The short version: we seat the headphone deliberately, for the best fit — adjusted for seal and for sound, the way a listener adjusts a headphone before settling in — rather than dropping it on at random. The common convention averages several careless placements together; we think that answers the wrong question, because nobody listens at a random seating. What we publish is one real seating, never a blend, chosen by a stated rule, with the repeatability reported alongside it.

Both channels are measured and kept. Nothing is smoothed into looking better than it is.

If your headphone ships with more than one pad set

Then that is the interesting measurement, and almost nobody publishes it properly. Pads move a response more than most people expect, and comparisons across the internet are usually made between different rigs, different units, and different seatings all at once — which tells you nothing about the pads.

Send the pad sets and we measure each one on the same rig, the same unit, the same seating procedure, and publish the difference. If you have a pad revision you want checked against the outgoing one, that works too.

Who runs this

Jamey Warren. I was employee #1 at Grace Design, where one of my jobs was building the automated measurement system the gear was tested against, and I later ran HeadRoom as president and CEO. I do the measuring myself, on my own bench, and the method above is the one I actually follow.