Welcome to GraphWorks!
Releasing in closed Beta exclusively to Sonic+ Members.
Just to reiterate: Only Headphones.com Sonic+ members will be able to access the database during this closed Beta. To sign up and become a Sonic+ member, head to this link.
For Sonic+ members: To gain access, you just need to create an account at the link above, link your new account to your Sonic+ Email, and you'll have access to our measurement database along with our visualization tools.
It has become clear to us at Headphones.com that the biggest issue with headphone & IEM measurements is neither accessibility, nor accuracy. The biggest issue in the discourse around measurements is overconfidence.
Every single day, one can find myriad enthusiasts posting headphone measurements in community spaces like our forum, our discord server, or various subreddits, claiming with profound certainty that “x headphone you enjoy is bad, because it measures like this” or “These two headphones measure identically, so they’ll sound the same,” all without knowing just how little the graph they’re pointing to supports what they’re saying.
People seeing a headphone measurement—a single line—often accompanied by a reference curve of some sort—another single line—invites a specific intuitive response. In their heads, people default to assuming that these two lines must converge; the solid line must meet the dotted line, because the dotted line is the “target” that the single line should be aiming for.
However, when one confronts all of the issues to do with headphone measurements—most importantly, the scattershot field of varying results that can arise when measuring even a single headphone on multiple different heads—while also confronting all of the issues with distilling headphone research that indicates the plurality of listener preference down to a unified target line…
…the only conclusion that can be drawn is that people, empowered with confidence in something that seems simple—a single measurement, a single target—are almost always overextending their judgment regarding what their headphone measurements actually show.
For that reason, we’ve decided to build our own tool for visualization of headphone measurements, built on a single foundational goal: No more oversimplifying the data indicating the performance of these incredibly complex headworn audio devices.
Headphones and IEM measurements are to be displayed, not as a line, but as a field of “potential results” with the most likely results being placed in the center, while the less likely results are placed on the fringes around the center.
Instead of a target, we opt to use a set of Preference Bounds gathered from Harman’s research into headphone listener preference, because it is eminently clear that a single sound profile will not please everybody.
Our mission is to make headphone measurements much harder to misinterpret or misuse, by laying threadbare the fact that they’re much less precise than many people think they are, while giving people guardrails to make sure the evaluations, comparisons, and judgments they’re making with this data isn’t leading them astray.
We have many plans for this tool, but for now we wanted to give our fans access to a closed Beta where they can try out the simplest version—a V1 of sorts. With this closed V1 Beta, Headphones.com Sonic+ members can try out our approach to visualizing headphone/IEM measurements for themselves, and give feedback/suggestions about how the tool works, and what sort of features they would like to see. We’re excited to finally have this for you all!
Features:
Percentile view
Shows a dual-field spread of headphone/IEM positional data, showing the 50th Percentile of inclusion in the central, solid field (50% of results included) while showing all results (100% of results included) in the surrounding, less opaque field.
Difference View
Want to show the variation across different heads? Use Difference View, which allows you to select multiple measurements of the same headphone and visualize it as a single field of “potential” frequency responses for those headphones.
