An Exhaustive Ranking of 3,000 Different Headphones. And the Winner Is…

Headphones are an extremely personal thing.  Not only is everyone’s ears different, but we all have different concepts of what constitutes beauty when it comes to sonic quality.

For example, do you prefer ‘phones that accentuate deep bass? Rather have more highs? What sort of spatial sense to do you want to experience?  And then we get into issues of quality vs. price, over-ear vs. in-ear, wireless vs. corded and so forth.

Time.com took on the task of going through nearly 3,000 headphones of all styles, sizes and prices, assigning each a grade of 1-100.  Two criteria were used:

1.  75% of the grade used reviews from tech sites like PC Mag, Wired and CNET.

2. 25% of the grade went to specifications and features

And because manufacturers often have many different models available, the scores were average out across each maker’s line.

Here’s what they found.  Dr. Dre is NOT happy (although I completely agree with Beats’ low score).

01. Shure (90)
02. Grado (89)
03. Klipsch (84)
04. Pioneer (83)
05. Sony (80)
06. AKG (79)
07. Sennheiser (78)
08. JVC (75)
09. Audio-Technica (74)
10. Panasonic (74)
11. Apple (74)
12. Bose (73)
13. Philips (72)
14. Creative (68)
15. Koss (68)
16. Skullcandy (62)
17. Beats by Dre (58)
18. Plantronics (57)

If it matters, I’m a fan of Sony over-ear studio headphones.  Grados have always been too expensive for me.  And I’m definitely going to have to try some Shures (although I do have some in-ear ones that are very, very good.)

(Via Consequence of Sound)