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I totally agree : No Tier lists. They change and give the impression only the best is good enough. Tonality is not defined by tier or price.
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Criteria is good but I guess regarding sound preferences, everything is subjective.
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We need to find understandable terms to define one’s preferred sound. That’s tough already as this is subjective too.
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I think some kind of survey with statements could work and be understandable. Like “I want lots of bass and subbass as it fits my music style.” or “I am treble sensitive.” or “I want to hear as much details as possible.” or “I want a fatigue free listening.”
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Or use case related : “I am listening mostly while I work in the office or at home.” “I listen a lot on the go”.
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Or music genre related.
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Maybe we can have a chat - brainstorming / priorisation to collect ideas and decide what makes the most sense?
Terms and ideally audible examples. This is absolutely critical. And yes, it’s all subjective but crowdsourcing should overcome this. We need to encourage people to rate criteria as similarly as possible. And, again separating “like” vs “objective”.
My experience with bass is a great example. Impact is not measurable objectively on a frequency response. This makes “impact” ideal for a criteria. However “boosted bass” is an FR response thing. I think FR analysis should be handled separately. (And it’s not clear to me how to do that yet)
The common terms for FR response that isn’t immediately obvious from a graph (warmer, darker, airy) may be very good criteria as well.
Resolution is a fantastic criteria.
I am all for facetime/webex! I would love to get more FR response experts. My feeling is the criteria will usually be a spectrum: wide soundstage <—-> narrow soundstage or warm <——> lean. So it’s not a better vs worse thing mostly. It’s preferential spectrum.
And still not sure about ranking IEMs vs Overears.
Great! But remember, no Apple guy here 
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As for terms like soundstage : this could be hard to grasp for newbs. I think describing what one likes or dislikes like in the example statements I wrote might be easier. Maybe it would have to be some kind of wizard that let’s you choose from either statements OR more technical terms like soundstage and resolution.
Just saying that we need to help newcomers too.
Regarding a videocall: I live in Switzerland, so CET for me. 
I think we could expect new comers to listen to audible examples for the criteria. Maybe even practice ratings.
Initially, I am not opposed to having the ability to rate be invitation only. (And maybe flagging people as knowledgeable reviewers so filtering by that is possible even after the flood gates open).
There are actually multiple problems here:
- Rating headphones a user has heard as objectively as possible (based on criteria).
- Finding headphones that match a users known preferences. (Basically a manual search tool based around selected criteria)
- Learning a users preferences through a purely subjective input. (Ranking what they like more/less in some capacity. I liked the soundstage of the he6se better than arya, for example.)
I imagine, the best case long term is to know which headphones a user prefers based on each criteria. #3 lets the system make recommendations with zero knowledge of the user on criteria. But, the user needs to have heard multiple headphones and say “I liked X more than Y”.
However, at the beginning, it’s more feasible to simply take a headphone you have heard and say “Something with more bass impact” and let the system work that out purely from verified ratings.
But the key is figuring out how to capture “objective” ratings and “subjective” preferences so easily a five year old could do it. If that is implemented, the site will work very well.
That’s gonna be a tough one to do. 
I shoot for the stars!
Also, this will all be shaped by the practical abilities of technological limitations. Still in dream mode for now.
I put together a super sketchy data structure and I am starting to build a UI. Doing minimum to show the structure. Some interesting questions are starting to appear. Fun times.
@Torq Would you be willing to provide some of your photography for me to use as visual material (backgrounds, navigation…) for testing this site? Or know others who would contribute their gorgeous photography?
Thanks!
That would have me competing against myself*, so unfortunately the answer is no.
As to other photographers I know, the ones that might be interested in contributing work to something like this are already members of/active on this forum. Their work speaks for itself and you can reach out to them without me as a middle-man.
The ones that aren’t here don’t have any particular interest in headphones, would need you to supply the gear as well as a brief/direction and would expect do it as normal, paid, commissioned work.
*It’s a long story, that I’ve talked about here - on and off - over the last year or two, and is launching imminently. Happy to talk more via PM, but it’s not something that should concern you, and I have no wish to discourage you from what you’re doing; I just can’t be involved, so I’ve stayed out of this discussion.
Understood! Thanks! Was just looking for easy/free assets for prettyfication. It’s not strictly necessary for me to move forward.
This is a free source of stock pictures. Have used it a lot for projects.
https://www.pexels.com/search/headphones/
Also I do have a few headphone pictures too (see all my reviews) of you want some of those, you can have them. 
Thanks @Tom_Ato I am going to play with from pexels just to see how they interact in mockups.
I am trying to draw a site hierarchy currently and pick a nav style that makes sense so I can start filling out content.
That’s great. Send me something, if you want my opinion as designer
@Tom_Ato Right now I am just getting framework and mockups as a starting discussion point in place. An interactive picture is worth a million words.
Some things I do know: I am likely using vuetify for this project. Which is a material design based frontend framework. If you want to look at that, for rapid prototyping purposes, that is the easiest UI for this kind of project. It has basically all the presentation trickery I need built-in.
Mostly I am just re-arranging UI Elements until I have a structure that makes sense. Once I have that, I’ll be ready to webex/show the concept. Basically storyboarding with the actual tools.
Great work. Let me know if you ever need a guinea pig to test it on.
I will need many guinea pigs. I just want the concept to be clear before the first real discussion. Right now I am simply making sure the concept is conveyable and the data is technically gather-able.
