New Review Styles at Headphones.com

New Review Styles at Headphones.com

In the interests of providing more timely and expansive coverage of new developments and products in the personal audio space, along with having more reader/reviewer engagement, Headphones.com will be introducing two additional review styles/structures in our product coverage:

• The first is simply a more concise review model, with more of an emphasis on sound-impressions. This is illustrated in the prior review of the AKG K371. As with our existing feature-length reviews, these will still include links to product-specific discussion threads at “The HEADPHONE Community”.

• The second is a “stream of consciousness” or “episodic” approach, that will serve up product introductions, feature summaries and, of course, still retain coverage of initial sound/performance impressions in each products introductory post here. This will then be expanded in both breadth and depth, covering all the facets of a product we already do in our long-form reviews - and with feedback based on more protracted usage of the item in question - over several successive, linked, posts in the headphones.com forum (“The HEADPHONE Community”).  The first example of this style of review is the Focal Arche review.

Some benefits to these additional review styles include:

• Better engagement, and deeper discussion both with, and between, readers; it is much more fluid to have a discussion via an innately interactive forum than a simple comment box. The more immediate conversation makes it easier for readers to be able to pose questions, or to seek clarifications, while the reviewer is still in possession of the item in question.

• First-impressions are often subject to “new toy syndrome”, and impressions can shift, often significantly, as someone spends more time with a piece of gear. Capturing these shifts in an episodic and progressive fashion preserves the history and evolution of the reviewers experience and thinking. This means the there may be multiple posts addressing sound or performance, or reliability of features and usage ergonomics over time (all of which will be indexed in, and linked from, the introductory posts to make finding them easy).

And, of course, we will continue to provide long-form, feature-length, reviews and articles as appropriate.