Test Bench 2.2

Changelog

By Christopher StewardUpdated Apr 20, 2026 at 10:04 am

Headphones Test Bench 2.2 removes the Cumulative Spectral Decay (CSD) test, retiring its waterfall plot visualization from our reviews.

Why Are We Making This Change?

CSD was introduced in our Headphones Test Bench 2.0. CSD plots are a well-established way to evaluate and visualize how acoustic transducers handle resonances and decay. However, its usefulness is contested in headphone testing due to the comparative lack of resonances in the tight space between the ear and a headphone driver (compared to a loudspeaker). Our implementation also utilized a novel 10.7ms Hann window, allowing us to directly compare wired headphones with their Bluetooth counterparts regardless of sample rate.

To accompany Test Bench 2.0, we published The Waterfall Illusion: How Analysis Parameters Can Overshadow Acoustic Truth In Headphones CSD Plots, which identifies the advantages, risks, and potential complications of including CSD data as part of our test suite. We left the conclusion open-ended, acknowledging that this test raised more questions than answers for most people, with the intention of encouraging feedback from the headphones community. We saw this as an opportunity to transparently showcase our findings and encourage debate, especially given the comparative lack of online discourse on CSD.

We received a lot of feedback on the article, most notably in this article from Headphones Test Lab, which helped us reflect on this test's value to our users. We've concluded that this measurement creates more confusion than it does insight, which ultimately goes against our testing ethos.

CSD is a test whose results are heavily subject to the windowing settings used. It requires careful calibration of the settings, depending on the headphones being tested. Given that Bluetooth headphones require a longer window than analog headphones, tweaking the window length on a per-review basis simply isn't viable or time-efficient for us. However, the one-size-fits-all implementation of the 10.7ms window for all headphones (and the misleading resonances in our results) creates unnecessary confusion for users, and rightly attracted criticism from experts in the community.

As a result, we've concluded that the best path forward for our headphone testing is to remove the test and the waterfall plot visualization from our reviews. The Waterfall Illusion R&D article will be kept online on our website for those who want to read it, but it will be updated to reflect this change. Finally, we'd like to thank Headphones Test Lab and everyone else who left feedback and insights that contributed to this decision.

Let us know what you think by leaving a comment or emailing us your feedback.

We are retesting popular models first. So far, the test results for the following models have been converted to the new testing methodology. However, the text might be inconsistent with the new results.

160 Headphones Planned To Be Updated

We are also planning to retest the following products over the course of the next few weeks:

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Test Bench 2.2 Changelog

Why Are We Making This Change?

160 Headphones Planned To Be Updated

Test Bench 2.2

Changelog