Audiophile Headphone Tournament - ONE Winner
Everyone always wonders what the best headphone is... but what if you could only choose one? Join the gang as they try to answer that question amidst disagreement, cope, and pain.
Across countless shootouts, reviews, and tier lists, it’s easy to get lost in graphs, novelty, and our romanticized feelings about certain headphones we like. But when three reviewers sat down to answer a deceptively simple question—if you could only own one headphone, which would it be?—a different set of priorities rose to the surface.
What quickly became clear is that this wasn’t about chasing perfect sound. Instead, we found tourselves evaluating each matchup through a much more practical lens due to it being a question of singular, long-term ownership. Once the idea of a “collection” disappeared, certain traits took on disproportionate weight.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Comfort emerged as easily the most important factor. When you only get one headphone, it has to be something you can wear happily. And indeed, some sonically impressive models were dismissed simply because they were too unwieldy or fatiguing to be a true “only headphone,” or at least, more unwieldy/fatiguing than the headphone it was up against.
In the end, the exercise wasn’t about crowning a flawless champion. It was about discovering which qualities actually matter when the hypothetical becomes personal and the choice becomes singular. And as the matchups marched on, it became obvious: the best “one headphone” isn’t the one that does the most. It’s the one that gets in the way the least.
So for that reason, Sennheiser HE 1 emerged in this contest as the one headphone we—as a group, not as individuals—would choose if we could only have one headphone for the rest of our lives. The reason? It's stupid comfortable, but also at best, it sounds fantastic, and at worst, it only sounds mediocre instead of downright ghastly.
