Category: Administration

The headphone reviews website starting life as an experiment, as a service for head-fi.org users to keep the headphone reviews all in one place. It was thrown together quite quickly, and has worked really well for a few years, but as it’s grown and the viewers of the website have changed it’s come time to put some time and effort into redeveloping it.

Over the next few months we’re going to be redeveloping the website from the ground up, a complete replacement of the front end and the logic that runs it. All the existing users, reviews, and ratings will be kept, but there will be minor changes like discarding the soundstage field, which I now think is pretty much a load of baloney. The redevelopment will make it much easier for us to add new content and features, fix bugs, and evolve the website over time.

I’m open to all ideas, big and small, that will make the website better. Please comment below with any ideas you’d like to see.

The look and feel of the website is a little dated now, but we don’t have the skills in-house to make a really nice, modern design. If I can find an individual or firm who would can do this for me their payment would be a link on the home page, which is seen by around 30,000 people per month. We want something modern, clean, and fresh, html compliant, seo optimised, perhaps a bit of gee-whiz ajax, that will integrate well with our user interface template framework. Any individuals or firms interested in working with us should use our contact page to get in touch.

We’ve been having a few problems with logins recently, some behind the scenes changes broke it for a few days. It should be back to normal now, if anyone has trouble logging in please contact us and we’ll look into it.

We’ve finally gotten around to adding a much requested feature – a text search function! Yeah, we know, welcome to the nineties, but at least we go there eventually!

You can search for manufacturer names or headphone models.  Please play with the text search on the site (not the blog search), if you have any problems email us or comment below.

We love getting headphones to review! It’s awesome to stay up to date with new releases in the headphone world, getting to try things out for ourselves and share them with our readers. The Audeze LCD-2 have been the standout cans we’ve reviewed so far, but the Beats by Dr Dre are still in rotation here to beat air conditioning and plane noise. Ultimate Ears also sent some really nice 5 EB Pro’s to review a while back, and while we were offered JHAudio in-ear monitors they never turned up, which was disappointing. We’ve never gotten Sony, Sennheiser, or Beyerdynamic headphones for review either.

Lately we’re getting a lot of cheap, poor quality headphones sent to us for review. Our reviews are honest and objective, so we pretty much bag them, but they’re not fun for us to listen to or review. Remember, this site is aimed toward quality headphones, not value headphones, headphones are reviewed according to their performance not their price.

We’re be happy to review good value, good performance headphones, as well as the high end, but please don’t send us rubbish. In future really poor performers won’t even be listed, as we don’t want to give them the SEO benefit of a link from our site.

I was just having a quick look at the web stats, and wow, traffic has really grown in the past twelve months! We’re averaging between 35,000 and 45,000 unique visitors each month, with about 1 million hits, 200,000 page views, and 10GB of traffic. That’s not to shabby!

The site isn’t commercial, it’s just a hobby and a service to people interested in headphones, but if it was that kind of traffic could probably be turned into a few dollars somehow! I hate web advertising though, so don’t worry, we’ll stay add free until someone makes us an offer I can’t resist… six digits might do it 😉

We know the website is already pretty handy for anyone looking to buy decent headphones, but we know it’s not perfect. Over the next couple of weeks we’ll do a bit of work sprucing the place up a bit, and adding a few new features, but we’d like to know what YOU want changed or added.

Here’s the current list of things to do:

• Add a search feature. Sure you can browse to headphones, but search would make it easier to find what you’re looking for.
• Browse based on value. Sometimes bang for your buck is more important than performance, which is currently our main benchmark.
• Remove the stupid fields, like soundstage. This is something that headphone geeks talk about that i’ve never really understood. With home speakers, sure, but not when you have two little speakers stuffed into your ears.
• An RSS feed. This is only a maybe, it depends if anyone’s interested or not.

What else would you like? Leave your feedback in the comments and we’ll do our best 🙂

Welcome to the new headphone reviews blog! The blog will feature reviews, reader questions, industry news, and really anything else we feel like posting. We’ll make the place look pretty some time… eventually. Hey it took 5 years to start a blog, don’t rush us!

If you have questions please email us on [email protected] – take out the word elephant from both places, that’s just to prevent spam. If we think others can benefit from your question and our answer we might post about it. This email address will change regularly to avoid spam, so please check back before you email us.