stacker45
Headphoneus Supremus
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- Dec 22, 2006
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The GH1, The Bushmills X, The RS1i, & Their Sound
(a.k.a. The Cook, The Thief, The Wife, and Her Lover)
At long last, I performed one of my three-way comparative listening tests on three of my newest Grados...
- The limited-edition GH1 (first of a new series of limited-edition headphones called the "Heritage Edition, with 1000 made from a maple tree that died on the Grado property);
- The limited-edition Bushmills X, which are semi-closed headphones of about three years ago made from the wood of Irish Bushmills whiskey);
- The RS1i, made of mahogany wood cups and that served as Grado's flagship headphone until the entry of the two over-ear models of the PS1000 and GS1000.
All of these headphones are on-ear. In all cases, they were driven with the Joseph Grado Signature Products HPA-1 amplifier. I have described the test method here, but in short:
- I identify 10 acoustic features (e.g., transparency, sound stage,...) and compare each of the three headphones on each of these features, generating a rank order for each of the three on that feature (1st place, or 3 points; 2nd place or 2, 3rd place or 1, ties are permitted and scored equally such that the total score for each 3-way comparison is 6... any row of the table below will further illuminate this)
- I use specific snippets of four test songs, as given in the link referenced above, to make these comparisons;
- I display the results in a color-coded table, where blue is "1st place," red "2nd place," and gold "3rd place."
- Just for fun (not meaningful), I also total the points describing rank order for the 10 tests to generate a total score for each headphone.
I try to declare a tie for any case where I do not hear a clear difference that I think (no way to prove this) I could reliably also hear in a blind test. When I total these, I would believe that score totals that differ by 3 or more are meaningful.
Here is the resulting table.
In short, the Bushmills X had the most transparency; the GH-1 was best at bass response, and the RS1i was the most balanced in performance across the 10 features.
I will eventually use these results and come further comparisons (e.g., my HF-1s, my three older SR325s that I got since comparing the SR325e) to add to my master comparison of all of my (20) Grado models.
Nice work John, I don't have the i version of the RS1, but a while back, my dealer loaned me a pair for a few days, and from what I can remember, I agree with your final scoring.
That being said, there is a possibility that the RS1i that I had might have been defective. I think that at about half the price of the other two, the Bushmills offers a great price vs performance ratio.
I should mention that my Bushmills, now have the L-cush, instead of the stock, S-cush, and I have G-cush, instead of L-cush, on my GH-1.
