Audio deals, because your damn earbuds died again

Audio has the most predictable price pattern of anything we track, and almost nobody uses it. Flagship headphone models follow a roughly annual or biennial refresh cycle, and the outgoing model's price typically falls sharply within weeks of a successor announcement. That's when the previous flagship becomes the best value product in the entire damn category — usually near-identical sound, one generation of features behind, and a third off. Knowing that one pattern is worth more than any deal site.

How we score audio

We compare against the product's recent trading range rather than its lifetime low, because outgoing flagship models decline structurally rather than fluctuating. A price sliding gently downward for six months isn't a deal, it's a trend, and it scores poorly here no matter how big the percentage looks. What scores well is a sharp break below the recent floor. Sales rank is weighted heavily in audio because the category has an exceptionally long tail of low-volume listings with near-identical specifications. If a set of earbuds ranks #38,000, the damn discount is not the reason nobody's buying them.

How the Damn Good Score works →