How we judge and rank

A verdict is only useful if you know what produced it. Here is ours.

Where a verdict comes from

Every judgement on this site is built the same way, and it is checkable line by line: we read the specifications, the manuals and the standards that apply to the instrument, we weigh what long-term owners consistently report about it, and we name the source of every figure we publish.

That last rule is the one that does the work. A number with a source can be argued with; a number without one is decoration. Where a figure exists in a manual and contradicts the marketing, we quote the manual. Where no reliable figure exists at all, the page says so and leaves the field empty rather than filling it with something plausible.

What we weigh

We rank on the specifications that decide the job and the ones that decide how long it keeps doing it. In practice that means five things:

• The number that governs the instrument. The action type behind a key count, the simultaneous inputs behind a socket count, the impedance behind a headphone model, the scale length behind a bass. Where a maker publishes a headline figure without the one that qualifies it, we say so rather than repeating it.
• The thing that decides whether it gets played. A headphone output on an amp, a beaterless kick pedal on a kit, a stand that does not move under an 88-key piano. Every category has one detail that decides whether the instrument is used or avoided, and that is the one we describe.
• What is not in the box. The power supply a keyboard needs to make a sound, the pedal sold separately, the cable an XLR microphone assumes, the setup a factory guitar has not had. This is weighted more heavily here than on most sites, deliberately: it is the whole gap between a working purchase and a disappointing one.
• Consumables and serviceability. What strings, heads, pads, earpads and batteries cost over a year; whether parts are sold separately; whether a manufacturer still supplies them years later. This is why gear that performs slightly worse sometimes outranks gear that performs better.
• Availability where you are. We verify each product reference market by market. An instrument that is excellent but not distributed in your country is not a recommendation we can make to you.

Where the evidence comes from

Three sources, weighted differently and always named. Manufacturer specifications and manuals, cited as such rather than repeated as fact — they are reliable for dimensions and unreliable for performance. Published standards and independent measurement where they exist. And the weight of long-term owner reports, which is the only practical source for the question that matters most: what is this instrument like in year ten, after the warranty and after the honeymoon?

Where a claim rests on one source rather than three, the page says so. Where we could not source a figure at all, the field is left empty and the gap is stated. We never fill one in by inference.

What the ordering means

We publish no scores. There is no number out of ten on this site, and there never has been — a single figure would have to compare a €600 digital piano with a set of strings, and it cannot. What we publish instead is an order: within a category, the sequence is deliberate, and the reasons for it are in the text.

Hubs are sorted by price tier — entry, mid, then top — because a hub should read like a budget ladder, not a list with the most expensive instrument nailed to the top.

The biases we designed against

Affiliate sites drift towards expensive products, towards whatever is newest, and towards whatever converts. Our defence is structural rather than a promise: no ranking on this site has ever been reordered because of what a product pays, several pages recommend a €6 adapter instead of a new instrument, and no product has ever been placed in exchange for anything.

The one bias we cannot remove is availability. We cover what is genuinely purchasable across Amazon's US, UK, German, French, Italian and Spanish stores, which means excellent instruments sold only through specialist dealers — a good deal of the serious European market — is under-represented here. Where that matters to the recommendation, the page says so.

Power is not a section, it is a constraint

Nothing in this category is dangerous to a person, and we do not pretend otherwise to sound serious. What is at stake is the equipment itself, and it is almost always electrical. A supply of the wrong polarity can destroy a pedal in seconds; 9 V DC centre-negative is a convention, not a guarantee; phantom power is safe for most microphones and not for every one; a daisy chain that ignores current draw hums or cuts out. Every page that describes a connection reports the manufacturer's figures for voltage, polarity and current, and no procedure on this site replaces the manual for your specific unit. Where a connection is commonly got wrong, we describe the correct version or we do not describe it at all.

Where this site stops

We write about equipment. We do not teach, we do not grade playing, and we do not give advice about hearing or exposure — where a manufacturer publishes a level in decibels or an impedance in ohms, we report the figure and leave the interpretation alone. Pages that touch the boundary say so in the text rather than in a disclaimer at the bottom.