I’m rooting for a headphone ranking chart based on distortion/ sinad. So far it’s been great with everything else. But recommendations based on when everything else is also factored in.
This would be interesting, but I fear we should be very careful because there are major differences between electronics and transducers, esp. headphones.
Solid state electronics allows for near perfect results, with insignificant distortion and floor noise levels, making SINAD ranking charts very meaningful.
Transducers on the other hand are very far rom such a perfection. All will have at least a few significant shortcomings, esp. re. most fundamental thing for high fidelity, their neutrality, i.e. their adequation to a target curve.
So the problem #1 is:
How could a SINAD measurement be meaningful if a headphone (e.g. one from Audeze) already fails miserably at producing a high fidelity FR?
Problem #2:
There is a lot of variation re. the frequency ranges at which the shortcomings occur. Should they be given the same importance ? I think not. I am taking an example : the human ear is optimised (see e.g. hearing thresholds) for the presence area (vocal communication), should a shortcoming occuring in the presence area be given the same weight as one occurring in the 19-20 kHz range? Clearly no, the first one is much more important.
Then there should be a frequency based weighting function. But which one ? I don't think there is an easy answer to this.
Problem #3:
And the same can be said of the shape of the deviation peaks and dips, a peak with a short base but a very large amplitude above the local baseline will be more detrimental than one with a larger base but less amplitude. How could we appropriately weight these differences?
I am not aware of any easy scientific answer.
So I don't see how purely measurement-based headphone rankings would be much meaningful, I am not convinced by a site like rting.com where you can even have measurements and rankings based on the distortion, like you want, but also on very debatable things like soundstage...
So while I am in favor of measurements only and measurement-based rankings for electronics,
for transducers I think measurements are still essential but should be completed by the discretionary evaluation of a serious, competent and honest reviewer (avoiding all the subjectivist, audiophiliac craze) who makes a ranking at his discretion. This was Tyll's approach, and is also Crinacle 's approach.
This leads to imperfection, this is why reviewer redundancy is actually important, the more diversity the better, I find it great to have not only Crinacle but also Amir too measuring and reviewing headphones.