My G&W TW-J1 SS headphone amp from Tsingha University in China came back to life recently, and I am able to listen to my Grado 325is again.
I am posting this here instead of full-size headphones or amplifiers because it is more about the relationship between the two components. You see, I can't stand this amp with any other headphones, and I can't stand these headphones with any other amp.
I can sympathize with the 325i haters out there in general; these headphones had way too much of a treble hump; calling them "bright" was too kind IMO. I was looking forward to trying the 325is balanced but had no choice but to use them single-ended, and I had to mod the pads to get any bass at all. Additionally, the sharpness of the highs fatigued me to the point of headaches very quickly.
And the amp, well it was never a good match for anything; it was my first non-portable headphone amp and I had some HD555s, and I wasn't impressed to say the least. It may have been one of the early-release "substandard components" versions, because the RCA pass-thru jacks became distorted to the point of uselessness a few months after I bought it on eBay. This made it a poor match for the rest of my system at the time and it sat around for a few years with very little use.
A poor entry into Head-finess indeed, but then again I was still years away from discovering Head-fi.org existed. More recently though, I was looking for a single-ended adapter for a 4-pin balanced XLR cable, and ended up buying a pair of 325is attached to it as it was a cable mod by a fellow Head-fier, my first purchase here.
To make a long story short, my attempted "leapfrog" into balanced headphone Nirvana got hijacked by a twice-defective balanced amplifier, and some faulty balanced HD600 cables. I ended up delaying the balanced rig in favor of the HE-5/EF5 combo, very nice btw.
I don't expect this cheap SS amp to last forever and I suspect that I will have a hard time replacing the listening experience with my 325is single-ended when it dies. I wonder what it is about this amplifier that matches up so well with these love 'em or hate 'em headphones? They seem to be much less fatiguing, and have way better soundstage and bass extension to boot, no matter what the source, as long as threy're plugged into the G&S
I am posting this here instead of full-size headphones or amplifiers because it is more about the relationship between the two components. You see, I can't stand this amp with any other headphones, and I can't stand these headphones with any other amp.
I can sympathize with the 325i haters out there in general; these headphones had way too much of a treble hump; calling them "bright" was too kind IMO. I was looking forward to trying the 325is balanced but had no choice but to use them single-ended, and I had to mod the pads to get any bass at all. Additionally, the sharpness of the highs fatigued me to the point of headaches very quickly.
And the amp, well it was never a good match for anything; it was my first non-portable headphone amp and I had some HD555s, and I wasn't impressed to say the least. It may have been one of the early-release "substandard components" versions, because the RCA pass-thru jacks became distorted to the point of uselessness a few months after I bought it on eBay. This made it a poor match for the rest of my system at the time and it sat around for a few years with very little use.
A poor entry into Head-finess indeed, but then again I was still years away from discovering Head-fi.org existed. More recently though, I was looking for a single-ended adapter for a 4-pin balanced XLR cable, and ended up buying a pair of 325is attached to it as it was a cable mod by a fellow Head-fier, my first purchase here.
To make a long story short, my attempted "leapfrog" into balanced headphone Nirvana got hijacked by a twice-defective balanced amplifier, and some faulty balanced HD600 cables. I ended up delaying the balanced rig in favor of the HE-5/EF5 combo, very nice btw.
I don't expect this cheap SS amp to last forever and I suspect that I will have a hard time replacing the listening experience with my 325is single-ended when it dies. I wonder what it is about this amplifier that matches up so well with these love 'em or hate 'em headphones? They seem to be much less fatiguing, and have way better soundstage and bass extension to boot, no matter what the source, as long as threy're plugged into the G&S
