Rating System

As humans, we are all different. We have our own preferences and feelings, and because of that exists personal differences in how we perceive our world and all it contains. This is called “subjectivity”.

Because reviews of products are always done by a human, it’s easy to see then how one person might perceive a certain product to perform better than what another person might. This element of subjectivity will always be present, but it’s important to try and minimise it as much as possible in an effort to make a review as objective as possible.

Writing an objective review and scoring a product in an objective manner means that we try to consider the merits of the product alone and in a realistic and fair manner with reference to other products whilst attempting to exclude a person’s (the reviewer’s) own biases.

It follows then that we needed to create a scoring system that’ll allow us to judge a product based on its merits, and then assign a final figure (score) to that product which will then make it easier for prospective buyers to compare products to one another.

Samma3a’s rating-system was designed with 2 key principles in mind. The first principle is that the scoring-system is based on the idea of “weighing” the scores with reference to which attributes are more important for a specific type of product. For example, portability and power efficiency is more important for closed-back and travel-orientated headphones than what they are for large open-back headphones. Open-back headphones are, by design, not suitable to be used in on-the-go situations (like on public transport, for instance), and so it would be unfair to deduct points from the score of an open-back set of headphones based on something that it’s not designed to do.

The second principle comes in the form of how we score attributes such as weight, battery-life, and overall value (among many, many other attributes). For example, the score for a product’s weight is calculated rather than estimated. In the case of portable players, the lightest player currently available would get a score of 10, and the heaviest player would score a 0. Those are the extreme boundaries on either end of the scale, and any product which falls into that category is rated with reference to those 2 products. If the lightest player weighs 30g and the heaviest player weighs 400g, then a player that weighs 200g would get a score of 5.2 for its weight, whereas a player that weighs in at 100g would get a score of 8.

The only part where subjectivity comes into play in our rating-system is in terms of sound quality. For instance, nobody knows what a perfectly neutral set of headphones are supposed to measure like (not yet anyways), and so we don’t have an accurate reference that we can use to judge products on. The closest we can get is trying to figure out how natural they sound. That’s the point of Hi-Fi (High Fidelity).