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Originally Posted by Zanth /img/forum/go_quote.gif
Hey Bilavideo, welcome to Head-fi! Great posts btw. You remind me of scrypt in your writing style. That is a big compliment if you don't know scrypt.
Interesting tweaks and mods you have done. I wonder if I can get away with mangling my wife's SR60's so I can try the open-air sound. Would be really cool to test against other Grados as well as some electrostats. I can imagine the decrease in bass, nothing to trap the sound waves for a time, but one also gets really fast tight bass, similar to what the HP-1000's are known for. They don't have elongated cups, reducing resonance first by using metal and secondly by decreasing overall time for the waves to interact with any material. Some like this bass, others not so much.
Wooden Grados are too delicate to work with and metal ones, too pricey, but some SR60's or SR80's would be interesting to test out with, not to mention the iGrados.
How difficult was it opening up the iGrados?
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Thanks for the kind word. Opening up the plastic Grados is not difficult, though the iGrado was a little tricky. The SR-60s are held together by glue. You can easily remove the pads and pull the cups off of the headband. A common process is to use steam to moisten the glue bindings. If you pour hot, steaming, water into a cookie sheet, you can place the cups face up, so the drivers are on the dry side. You don't want the water too hot; otherwise, it will warp the plastic. But you do want it hot enough that the steam rises and makes it easy to work the cups loose. They pry apart. Just be patient and avoid using anything so sharp it will dent or deface the plastic. The ones I experimented with were used, and I was solely interested in sound, so I was prepared to suffer some minor scratches, etc. There are videos on Youtube and a site with "Grado mods" where somebody used a spoon to work the plastic loose.
With respect to a decrease in bass, I was expecting the same thing, but it didn't happen - at least not as far as I could tell. If anything, I was surprised at the detail in the bass (if that makes any sense). You might notice a difference if you removed the air chambers from the woodies but as far as I can tell, these plastic shells did nothing for the bass. All they did was muddy up the treble.
As far as I can tell, the real quality of the bass is a combination of the driver and the cushions. With a good seal, the cushions act as a baffle, perhaps the only baffle really preventing front and rear-wave cancellation. Right now, my bass is dependent on the recording and headphone placement on the ears. I prefer the on-ear approach, despite any reported ear fatigue, because I can feel the bass on my lobes and it's a nice effect.
One reason I was expecting some kind of drop-off in bass was the experience reported by users of the ill-fated AKG 1000. Wasn't that going to be the pair of cans to die for, with those huge drivers, set up just so they could hover right alongside the ear? But with no cushions to act as baffles, people said they were bass-lite. That's basically the problem with the earbuds. No seal, no deal. But as long as the cushions provide a good seal, you've got bass, pounding bass if you want it. I've got tracks where the bass is not great, but on any track where bass is prominent, I can't believe how pounding these cans get.
But it's not just stereotypical bass. Right now, I'm listening to The Move's My Marge. I've got a sax in my right ear and what sounds like a basoon in the left - and they're both tickling my lobes. It's a far cry from Journey, whose recordings just don't stack up, in clarity, against even Al Yankovic singing, "I Love Rocky Road." Why do Yankovic's armpit squeezes sound so much clearer than Journey's cave-like recordings? Was it the stadium-rock aesthetic?
The one strategy the GS-1000, with its salad bowls, seems to have been reaching for was the attempt to create a seal without muting the high-end. One of the issues with on-ear headphones is that the "seal" approach operates at cross purposes with the desire to "open up" the sound. By using the head around the ears as the foundation for the seal, Grado was clearly hoping to get his bass and keep the treble "open." But how much "concert hall" is enough? I always thought I had pretty big ears, that is until I bought the GS-1000s. It's possible that the attempt to create a one-size-fits-all solution pushed these cushions past their smartest calibration point.
Here's another issue, one that on-ear headphones can partially address where circumaural cans won't. There's a certain disconnect between the aesthetics of cushion design and the actual shape of the ears. We're used to expecting headphone cushions to be round and fit flat against our heads. But ears don't look like that. They don't "couple" so well that way. If you reach back and feel around the seal behind your ears, you'll notice that gaps exist back and beneath. Such gaps leak bass. Unfortunately, the attempt to create cushions that are attractive to the public has taken precedence over their efficiency - even at Grado Labs.
Grado's rivals have come up with their own idea of a sensible variation on the theme, but none of it is all that impressive. If Grado has produced round cups and cushions, others have come up with elongated, sometimes squarish, monstrosities. It's still about selling a design that looks good to customers, many of whom don't taste the food they shovel into their mouths. What's needed is a cushion that allows the cups to be worn at an angle. Instead of aiming straight in from the sides of the head, the cups should angled to match the ears' orientation, which is not necessarily parallel to the head. Some people have Prince Charles ears that stick out like Dumbo's. Some people have ears that run straight back. Many, I suspect, have ears at a crossroad between forward orientation and biology's version of aerodynamics.
It seems to me that a great solution would be tapered cushions. Their shape should present less cushion in front and more cushion in the back. This would probably make Grado fans look even less fashionable than they already do, but it would better serve the goal of promoting bass while keeping the soundstage open. I tried to do this manually by depressing the cushions in the front, sliding them down, but I had to be careful not to break the seal; otherwise, I'd get the "open" high end but lose some bass.
