With all due respect to those serious headphone geeks who don't hear ear-to-ear with me on this one, I have to admit a certain degree of skepticism here. To me, this move by Grado - to give an "i" to everything in stock - looks like the most obvious of gimmicks.
Let me preface my point with some background. I'm no engineer, but for the last couple of years, I've been a Grado freak. I stumbled onto Grado after sending back plastic schlock from Bose and Shure. I was about to go full-bore cynical until I read a review of the SR-60 and decided to take the plunge. Opting for the SR-80 (for a few dollars more), I was immediately blown away by the crystal clarity of the Grado sound. Within a month or so, I made the jump to the SR-325i, which lasted me about three months before I was sporting the RS-1, which lasted me about a month before I bought a GS-1000. I currently own every item in the "i"-challenged product line, with the exception of the SR-125, SR-225 and RS-2.
I drive people nuts about Grado, including the kids I teach, the physical therapist I went to after a skateboarding accident and a very-disappointed salesman at the Bose store. Today in church, I found the guy with the Beatle tie and asked him if he knew about the whispers on Let It Be. When he didn't, I told him, "Cue it up to 1:06, right after the line, "For though they may be parted."
But there's a difference between specific innovations (open-air design, high-purity copper wiring, little drilled holes in the back of the transducer housing, gummy sound-damping on the back of the housing) and mystical, magical, mumbo jumbo. With the likes of Sony and others taking notes, it's to be understood that Grado wants to keep its trade secrets. But listing an "improved" driver doesn't come near to making a compelling case for a $750 upgrade to the GS-1000.
It seems to me that Grado is trying to kill two birds with one stone: It wants to go after those willing to pay more for a used PS-1 than a new GS-1000. It also wants to raise prices in the middle of a recession. Its apparent strategy is to claim these are all new products. And aren't they? See the "i"?
What's particularly brazen is the Olympic-style flips and twists in replacing Mahogany with aluminum. After years of insisting that the mahogany-packing RS-1, RS-2 and GS-1000 are superior to the aluminum-encased SR-325i, Grado is now rebaptizing the GS-1000 in aluminum. This "hybrid" will have a mahogany base with an aluminum rear chamber slipped on like Cinderella's golden slipper. It makes no sense to me to argue that aluminum and mahogany are the ebony and ivory of great sound. Grado is simply going after the PS1 crowd and their aluminum-housed RS-1.
Given the complaints that the GS-1000 is too sibilant, it's to be expected that Grado would shift away from a flagship that, to many, sounded like a sonic Edsel. But in shifting to the PS-1000, Grado has kept the salad-bowl cushions of the GS-1000, which were a large part of the "problem." Lifestyle products like to speak in candy-coated simplicities whereas the world of hi-fi sound is littered with a lot of "ifs." There's no such thing as the perfect choice, let alone the perfect headphone. Every choice brings with it certain costs and benefits. Those big salad bowls on the GS-1000 were designed as a response to the criticism that Grado's soundstage is too narrow. But the "Grado sound," which some dismiss as "bright," "raw," "harsh" or "too up front," is the charm of the product. For some, it may take a bit getting used to, but the emphasis on midrange opened the door to spectacular clarity and detail.
The salad bowls gave the GS-1000 a more recessed, "refined" sound, closer to some of its competitors - such as the relatively-dull Sennheiser. That "concert hall" put the listener back so many rows, letting in some of that high-end sparkle muffled out by the narrow soundstage. To do this, the big bowls pushed the ear further from the driver. But this endangered the bass, which was tweaked. The result was a driver with thumping bass, high-end sizzle, but a disarming drop in midrange. To many, the GS-1000 sounded too much like all of those home theaters sporting "satellite" tweeters, balanced by a corner subwoofer. This equalizer smile left many Gradoheads feeling left at the altar. They paid the highest for a headphone at odds with the Grado sound.
But most of these issues came back to the salad bowls. Irritated by the sometimes-abrasive treble, I replaced my bowls with doughnuts, at least until I could properly burn them in. This eliminated screeches at the high-end but with all that throbbing bass, it made me wonder how a person could create a mod that would "open things up" without overdoing it.
When Grado announced plans to sell a PS1000, I decided to try something. I have an SR-60 I've "modified" by replacing the original pads with doughnuts. After removing the grill, I decided to remove the entire air chamber, leaving the transducer naked as a streaker. I also punched holes in the rear screen, aligned with the 10 little BB-sized ports. The idea was to leave as little surface area for resonance as possible. This would reduce the total SBL of the driver, making it the sonic opposite of a horn tweeter, but leave, as much as possible, only the front waves from the driver itself.
The result was amazing clarity. Even though the SR-60 lacks the UHPLC wiring of the higher-end Grados, this chamberless SR-60 is about as open as it gets. In comparison, my RS1 sounded more colored and cannish. I've been making my family do Pepsi tests on my SR-60 and my RS-1 and GS-1000. Although my 15-year-old son thinks the RS-1 has more bass, I find the unechoed infinite baffle of this SR-60 preferable. In fact, for the life of me, I can't see why an open-aired headphone - with no pretensions at creating an acoustic suspension system - would need an "air chamber" to begin with.
There's another tweak that I found particularly helpful. As mentioned before, the allure of the salad bowls is that they push the ear away from the driver. This is to widen the soundstage and "open things up," particularly for high-end detail. But the degree to which this is needed depends on the shape of the headband. Shoving the driver against the ear, like a vice, tends to mute the high end. Reducing the tension opens things up, without the need of salad bowls. What's more, by careful bending, you can both loosen the vice and shape the orientation between ear and driver.
Various strategies have been employed to "widen things up" manually, including add-on accessories for mechanically distancing ear and driver. I found the best solution was to augment the Spartan head band with padding that gently pushes the jaws of the vice apart, reducing ear pressure and allowing the earlobe to vibrate more freely. Grado's strategy - in employing the salad bowls - is to go around the ear and to use each cushion to push ear and driver apart. This may seem intuitive, but where it eliminates contact between the earlobe and the cushion, it reduces a valuable medium for communicating bass response. If some part of the headphone is going to make contact with the head, to push the driver away, it should not be anything whose vibrations are being used to communicate sound. Perhaps people don't think of a cushion as a medium of sound communication, but it's hard to imagine ever being so innocent.
If you take the headband on the lower Grados - that Spartan piece of vinyl over wire - and augment it with padding that pushes the drivers back from a point just above the ears, you end up with pads that are making contact with the earlobes, but with a pressure so light, they're practically floating. What you'll get is a tactile flutter that augments bass nicely without sacrificing soundstage. With the right adjustment,you can get a sound that is neither too open nor too closed.
And none of it involves a "hybrid" of mahogany and aluminum.
