How I Listen, and What a Measurement Will Not Tell You

The recommendations on this site come from one person. This page says who that is, what actually happens before something gets recommended, and what the measurements can and cannot tell you. If you only read one thing here, read what a measurement will not tell you.

Who is talking

I am Jamey Warren. I started at Grace Design in Boulder in 1997 as employee number one, running production, and I brought the Lunatec V2, the 901 and the 801R from prototype to a thing you could actually build at volume. Later I spent most of a decade at HeadRoom in Bozeman, across three separate stints, hired as a sales associate and finishing as president of the company. HeadRoom is the company that built the American headphone specialty market from the 1990s on, largely by measuring headphones and publishing the graphs when almost nobody else would.

So I have been on both sides of this: the bench where the numbers come from, and the counter where somebody asks what they should actually buy. Those turn out to be different jobs, and most of what follows is about keeping them in the right order.

What happens before anything gets recommended

The order is deliberate.

It gets listened to cold. An hour at least, longer for anything expensive, before I have read what anyone else thinks.

Then it gets lived with. Days, not minutes. Comfort is a slow variable.

Then it gets compared. Against things at the same money and the things either side of it in price, switching back and forth on the same passage. Almost nothing about a headphone is absolute. Nearly everything is relative to what you had on your head five seconds ago, which is why comparison in one sitting is worth more than months of memory.

Then, if there is a measurement, it happens here. After the listening, never before. More on that below.

Then it gets written up, including the parts that are not flattering. If a piece has nothing critical in it, either I did not listen hard enough or I should not be selling it.

Nothing here gets a score

No numbers out of ten, no stars, no five category rubric where everything quietly lands on 8.3.

The moment you put a number on something you have committed to a comparison framework that does not exist. The number feels objective and is not, and it flattens the only useful part of a judgment, which is what specifically is good, for whom, and at what cost. An 8.3 tells you nothing you can act on. "Too heavy for a long session, and the bass is the best at the price" tells you whether to buy it.

What replaces the score is a named pick, with the reasoning written out underneath it. Each guide names a few, and the heading says what job that one does: where to start, the one most people should buy, the one to stretch for. That is the recommendation.

Listening first, measurement after. Always

A graph seen first tells you what to hear. Put the curve at the top of a page and every sentence underneath it gets read as an explanation of the curve, by the writer as much as by the reader. Put it at the bottom and the listening has to stand on its own, and then the measurement either corroborates it or does not. Only the second arrangement can tell you anything you had not already decided.

So where a measurement appears, it comes after the verdict, never above the listening notes and never in the photographs. The graph is the check on the account, not the frame around it.

Where the two disagree is the interesting part, and the write-up says so when that happens.

What a measurement will not tell you

This is the section I would most like you to read, because measurement is easy to oversell and the overselling is everywhere.

It will not tell you whether you will like it. Two headphones can measure closely and feel nothing alike, and preference is real rather than a failure of taste. Nobody has a curve that predicts what you will reach for on a Tuesday evening.

It will not tell you about fit, and fit changes the measurement. How a headphone seals against your head is not how it seals against a measurement fixture, and it is not how it seals against the next person's head either. On some designs that difference is small. On others it is the largest thing in the graph. This is why you will not see a pass or fail claimed here on a model whose seating behaviour has not been properly characterised.

It will not tell you about comfort, weight, clamp, or heat, and those decide whether a headphone keeps getting worn far more often than frequency response does.

It will not settle an argument about resolution or soundstage. There is no single number for either.

It is one rig on one day. A different fixture gives different numbers on the same headphone, which is why comparing curves from two different rigs is usually a mistake unless both state their method.

What it is genuinely good for: catching a fault, showing you what changed when a pad was replaced, telling you where a headphone sits relative to another one measured the same way on the same rig, and proving that a specific unit was checked by somebody before it shipped. That last one is smaller and more useful than the claims usually made for measurement.

The best answer goes first

The best answer gets the top slot whether I can sell it or not. If the thing I would put on your head is something I have no way to sell you, it still goes first.

When I get it wrong

I will. Opinions change with time on the head, a pad revision changes a headphone, and sometimes I was simply wrong.

If a verdict changes materially on something you bought here on my recommendation, write to me and I will sort it out.

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Come and hear it

The listening room is at Free River Studios, 215 E. Lewis St #301, Livingston, Montana. It is free and it is by appointment. Bring the record you know best.