I need to classify whether a product sound "good" and "bad" based on FFT of its audio recording. The FFT magnitudes are show for frequencies from 0 to 7khz, with a frequency resolution of 5 hz, so there are lots of bins.

The problem is there are many ways a product can sound "good", and many ways a product can sound "bad". It's hard to come up with an explicit rule. Moreover, the recordings are done at a noisy factory environment where ambient noise can be random, although it only shows significant magnitudes at <1500 hz. But sometimes some machine sound can cause a peak at higher frequencies. 

Therefore, I don't think a regression or random forest based on FFT magnitudes would work well. KNN seems ideal for this because as long as I have training data recorded for all different kinds of "good" and "bad" products, under various ambient conditions, it seems this problem is just a matter of finding the nearest neighbors, with the distance defined as Euclidean distance in a high dimension space (each frequency bin is a dimension). 

I just feel KNN is perfectly suited for this because I don't need to calibrate the equipment or deal with decibels with some reference. But if "good" and "bad" products tend to have certain profiles (different peaks at different frequencies), then even with some ambient noise which can alter the magnitudes to an extent, KNN should still be more robust than a parametric model. 

Is my understanding of the merit of KNN over parametric model valid in this scenario? Should I try to reduce the dimensions prior to KNN?

Thanks