Review guide

Key points

Badges

I only award badges when I feel I have enough experience of a price bracket to give a mark.

Recommended

The product has something good that will be understood by most people. And there’s no bad about it.

Notable

The product has something outstanding. Maybe better than ‘Recommended’ items. Other issues prevent wide recommendation.

Beware

The product has something bad that needs to be warned about. But there is something good—for some uses the product may be of interest.

Avoid

The product has something bad that will disappoint most people. And I can’t find a use case.

It’s possible for a product to gain more then one badge. In those cases, only the most significant badge is given.

Badges are not everything

The market for portable HiFi is wild. There are products I don’t recommend because I think others will not be impressed or, for example, the product needs a special rig. But I may like what the product can do.

I review within price brackets

I do not expect ‘outstanding’ £8 headphones to sound like ‘outstanding’ £800 headphones. That said, there is expectation between price brackets. There are price brackets where I’ve not found anything I like or would recommend.

I don’t trust my rating scales

I’m usually right if I say an earphone is quiet or loud. But if I say an earphone makes average volume, I mean only it is not quiet or loud. That lack of trust is true for (near) anything I give a rating to.

Detail notes

Price

Price is what I paid, or would pay, including Postage & Packing. Original Sales Prices, where quoted, do not include Postage & Packing. All US Dollar prices (often quoted for original sales prices) are converted by a fixed exchange rate of 1 USD = 0.7 GBP.

Lowband/midband/highband

The reviews have no interest in technical terms like ‘treble’ and ‘bass’ (to me, ‘bass’ is a family of musical instruments). Also, I might say ‘avoid’ some replay gear because of a frequency effect, but I never bought replay gear based an overall frequency profile.

Robustness

I can not test for robustness. Opinions given are a guess, sometimes informed by reading user reviews.

Further: I do not think you can buy portable sound replay—a complicated electronic/physical gadget—for £20 and expect it to last. I read a sensible comment in an online user review—like this,

I only buy cheap earphones so I don’t need to worry about them. I expect to spend about £20 a year replacing them.

If a component fails, I don’t fail it. My samples are not big enough to be representative.

Swells

The reviews sometimes mention ‘swells’. The word ‘swell’ means any wide‐frequency, usually large‐volume, attack. Score composers sometimes call one of these effects an ‘orchestral hit’. But ‘swell’ also includes the leading edge of a string section, and drum/bass/guitar unison in rock music.

Precision

If the reviews talk about precision, it is when different instruments, otherwise similar in sound and position, can be heard separately. What I suspect is a similar effect is notable when a string section saws together. The possible causes are many and cross each other.

Quibbles

Measurement vs. listening

A long argument in HiFi. I do not have the resources to measure. This is a site of empirical review, informed by background research and reading.

Why don’t you publish your tunes/sound sources?

It sounds scientific… to publish sounds so the experiment can be repeated. It sounds helpful, so the user can shape an idea of the reviewer’s ‘taste’. But too often listing sound sources is a record review. Moreover, those reviews are often of ‘HiFi’ recordings. Guarantee you that 9 out of 10 portable device users have not heard of Diana Krall.

Why don’t you publish your test gear?

I’m not interested in the ladder climb of HiFi acquisition. I say, trust my reviews or not, but not a list of specifications.