I'll be your Huckleberry. The 325 wasn't my first headphone. It was my second. I started with the SR80, then jumped to the SR325i - something like four to six weeks later. I wasn't any worse for the wear.
On the other hand, what is a "first" headphone, anyway? Who hasn't had a headphone in their entire life? Where did this guy grow up? A tropical island in the South Pacific around 300 nautical miles south-southwest of Fiji? Come to think of it, my first "headphone" of sorts was an earphone, back when I was a child and there were these things called reel-to-reel and an earphone was a single, echoey junker that fit into one ear.
I got my first set of actual headphones when I was 11 or 12, which I used to listen to a cassette tape of the soundtrack from Star Wars. The cassette player - purchased by my father from Kmart (so he could listen to some radio preacher's "special offering") had an earphone jack. My headphones only had the 1/4" connector, so I sawed it off and spliced the wires together so I could get sound in both cups. Back in those days, earphone jacks were my new best friend, because I was cutting them up to make homemade interconnects between the earphone jack on a transistor radio and the auxiliary mic on that Kmart tape recorder. I didn't know what I was doing, sort of like now, but it seemed that if you could connect the mic to the speaker, you could get clean sound - albeit in mono - and make your own bootleg recordings.
Napster Flintstone.
I soon figured out that the trick wouldn't work on a regular mic jack, and it almost didn't work on the auxiliary jack (because of the gain) till I pulled a volume control out of a radio that went into the trash and used it to attenuate the gain. For a dollar a cassette, I supplied all my friends with recordings off the radio, clean recordings they could use instead of paying $1.25 for a 45 (Proving that iTunes really is a bargain today). My first headphones were big, circumaurals with telephone handset cable (that curly stuff) in big, thick, black. They were heavy, still managed to give me ear fatigue and, by today's standards, pretty pathetic helmeted monsters. But the sound coursing through them - mono though it was - was huge compared to the cheap speakers on my "portable gear."
One thing I didn't like about them was that mono sound. I didn't realize the gap until one day, hanging out with my violin instructor, and listening to my albums on his loudspeakers. I had no idea you could separate the channels like that. He explained the concept of stereo to me, which had me then tearing up portable record players so I could wire my headphones separately. Because I didn't know how to make a stereo jack, my headphones were spliced directly to the stereo speakers, which then made it necessary to concoct another volume control to attenuate the huge surge in sound, even at low levels. Even after I got my first component stereo with its own separate receiver, I was blown away by how much better my neighbor's headphones sounded. He had these flat, silver, on-ears headphones that just killed the junk I had. (He as an optometrist with a decent collection of vinyl.)
I eventually tore my headphones up, as I keep doing, to see what made them run. Those ugly mothers had paper cones. They were replaced by another giant pair from Woolworth, until I bought a pair of portables from a friend at the beginning of the 80s. These were fashionably low-profile, sitting just outside the ear canal, a precursor to the earbuds that were coming. In the mid-80s, I was serving a Mormon mission in Utah, when a companion of mine shared with me these teeny-tiny things - earbuds of some sort. They didn't sound as full but they had a certain elegance.
In the mid-90s, I bought a pair of Sony studio-monitor headphones - black monsters with the telephone cable - which were $99 (but I got them half price). These sounded genuinely better, but when they developed a short in the cable, nothing I could find on the cheap had any decent sound. It was all muffled, as if one were hearing opera sung by someone with a mouth full of marbles. I had heard Bose headphones in one of the Bose outlets in a mall, and had been impressed by the big boom-boom of the bass. I wasn't, however, ready to shill out what seemed like a lot of money, nor would my wife have stood for it at that time. I was still trying to get my law practice off the ground. We needed all the money we could get to pay for Rolm phones and signage. Those Bose headphones were more than what I spent on research through Westlaw. I can remember talking to somebody at a Circuit City (now closed) and saying I was looking for something "like Bose." This guy (still drinking the Kool-Aid) said they didn't have anything "like Bose," and that if I wanted the "Bose sound," I would need to just dig deep and buy Bose.
Around the beginning of the millennium, I was searching the internet when I found some reviews of the Grados and decided to give these babies a shot. Nobody was selling them locally, so I took the second cheapest plunge I could: The SR80. When I got them, it really was like falling in love. The bass wasn't overwhelming, but the clarity took me back to the high-end cans of my optometrist friend. I call the SR80s "my first real headphones" because they are what put me on the path to headfi-related bankruptcy. About a month or so after I got them, I threw down the $300 to buy the 325i's. As I've mentioned before, I wasn't all that impressed with them, compared to the SR80s I had burned in. But by the time I moved up again - six months later - to the RS1, I found these BNIBs taking a backseat to my burned-in 325s.
Until I burned in my RS1s, I couldn't appreciate what they had to offer because the 325s were worn and in the groove. I even scuffed them good during a nasty fall off my skateboard (though my goldies fared better than two fingers on my right hand). I don't know if a newbie would be able to appreciate a 325 for what it is. I sometimes think there's an unspoken disappointment with those who buy mid-to-high before they've had a chance to wallow in the sewers. Such people will never know what it was like to eat fried baloney - and like it. Till I'd scored my first 225, I couldn't understand why so many 225 lovers were so catty about the 325, crying "Marcia! Marcia! Marcia!"
So yeah, maybe your buddy shouldn't start with the 325, just as you don't buy your kid a Porsche when he's 16. Take your buddy to Walmart. Let him buy stuff off hooks and listen to them for a while. Then, when he's ready to get serious, let him begin to taste some better things. Maybe he's not ready - emotionally or financially - for the Stax Omega or the HD800. Maybe he'd gag if you told him those PS1000s really did cost $1,700. He'd probably gag if you showed him the HF2s that cost $500 (before Todd the Vinyl Junkie cut all our throats with his one great deal of a lifetime).
If your buddy wants to go Grado, let him eat cake - while listening to an SR60. And when he later sells it, tell him to look me up. I need more spare parts for my Frankenphones.
