Unless the best headphone was designed in 2014?

The release date of the headphones is not the important data point there. The date of the article is what we care about. The article is 8 years old and therefore excludes thousands of new headphones that could conceivably be the best. Even if today's best was released in 2014, a 2014 article pointing to that same pair isn't a very authoritative source when shopping for headphones today.

Headphones don’t age. It’s perfectly fine for such an old article coming up, especially if gets referenced on prosumer forums such the r/audiophile or r/hifi subreddit.

Sennheisers headphone division got eaten by its own success: the sennheiser hd 650 is so durable and has such a great soiund quality, that people just aren’t switching away from that 20 year old headphone.

In case the link you mentioned isn’t about that mid range headphone, it’s probably about the beyerdynamics T1.

Besides talking about audio equipment: I hate the sites on google who update the dates of their articles although the content wasn’t changed. Happens way to often. I googled the release date of BOTW2 a few days ago, and 3/4 of the search results were blatant seo spam where the initial article was about something else, and then the headline and date were changed in order to get more traffic from google.

Imo you are setting the wrong priorities for a search engine.

>Headphones don’t age. It’s perfectly fine for such an old article coming up, especially if gets referenced on prosumer forums such the r/audiophile or r/hifi subreddit.

But an outdated article doesn't guarantee this to be true. For example, maybe the manufacturer released an updated version that is a better value proposition and kept the old model around to have a more budget friendly option. Or perhaps another company purchased the manufacture and demand they cut costs. Or maybe this model is new and people haven't yet learned that there is a specific part that frequently fails after a few years of use. An old article can't speak to these hypotheticals. It doesn't mean the article is wrong. It just means that the article is less informed than if it were written today giving the exact same recommendation.

>the sennheiser hd 650 is so durable and has such a great soiund quality, that people just aren’t switching away from that 20 year old headphone.

But this is only something that can be truly known after those 20 years.

>I hate the sites on google who update the dates of their articles although the content wasn’t changed.

I agree, and while this is a related issue, it isn't really the same problem. It is a failure in Google's anti-SEO features. They don't need to trust the date on the article. They could compare cached versions of the page to see what changed besides the date.

> But an outdated article doesn't guarantee this to be true.

Nor does a new article on a "review" site monetized with affiliate links guarantee it. So who do you trust more? Older but honest review from an expert or a new affilate driven review? Kagi choses the former as likelier to be more valuable to the user in this case.

The issue still is that there objectively could be better headphones released after 2014.

If I saw a photograph of all the cellphones from 2004, I can pick out the best cellphone, this doesn’t mean that the best cellphone from 2004 is still the best cellphone.

It’s implied that “best” usually means what is “best” for what people need today as those needs evolve drastically over time and especially with tech products.

Why is that the choice? You are assuming an expert has not written an honest review of the headphone market in 8 years.

It would presumeably surface in the results too.

This is actually a feature. Try answering the query 'best headphones' yourself.

Must be the peak. That's when the first "true wireless earbuds" came out.