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Grado Fan Club!
May 24, 2021 at 3:59 PM Post #47,476 of 66,259
Never posted in this thread before but I have been a Grado cartridge lover for 40+years. Tried a set of 60's (or maybe they were 80's?) a number of years ago, probably i series. I was impressed by their dynamics and especially how they presented electric guitars but I found them deadly uncomfortable and they kinda made my brain burn. Granted I was driving them with shitte source equipment. Fast forward, bought a pair of SR80e a few years ago and after a moderate amount of tweaking (vented an additional 3 openings on the drivers, damped cups and magnets with adhesive backed felt, replaced headband with padded, change a lot of pads - settled on Yaxi) I have come to enjoy them very very much.
Source amplification in the office is a Liquid Spark on the desktop fed from the tape out on B&K preamp with files from hdd via Topping D30 or HeartCD6000, in the living room the headphone out from an Anthem Pre2L (6922 based). They scale really well from tubes.

Stumbled on the X announcement and started back tracking through this thread last night and worked myself into a fever pitch. So...a set of 225x should be delivered tomorrow morning. I am very excited. I wish I had a baseline to compare against other than my modded SR80e but I never found the need to go beyond them (other than ruminating about RS2's...). I don't expect a night and day experience but I do expect improvement. And of course I will have to swap pads around to see what's what...
 
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May 24, 2021 at 6:25 PM Post #47,477 of 66,259
sjbrook said:
Never posted in this thread before but I have been a Grado cartridge lover for 40+years. Tried a set of 60's (or maybe they were 80's?) a number of years ago, probably i series. I was impressed by their dynamics and especially how they presented electric guitars but I found them deadly uncomfortable and they kinda made my brain burn. Granted I was driving them with shitte source equipment. Fast forward, bought a pair of SR80e a few years ago and after a moderate amount of tweaking (vented an additional 3 openings on the drivers, damped cups and magnets with adhesive backed felt, replaced headband with padded, change a lot of pads - settled on Yaxi) I have come to enjoy them very very much.
Source amplification in the office is a Liquid Spark on the desktop fed from the tape out on B&K preamp with files from hdd via Topping D30 or HeartCD6000, in the living room the headphone out from an Anthem PreL2 (6922 based). They scale really well from tubes.

Stumbled on the X announcement and started back tracking through this thread last night and worked myself into a fever pitch. So...a set of 225x should be delivered tomorrow morning. I am very excited. I wish I had a baseline to compare against other than my modded SR80e but I never found the need to go beyond them (other than ruminating about RS2's...). I don't expect a night and day experience but I do expect improvement. And of course I will have to swap pads around to see what's what...
Click to expand...
Good choice! I owned 225e and 325e and while both are great I preferred the 225e for these reasons: one of the heavy cups on the 325e broke off the gimbal, I glued it back and when it broke again I bought a second hand 225e, this was a few years ago and it still works flawlessly. It's much lighter than the 325, not only is it more comfortable due to that but hasn't broken due to the very light plastic cups being easy for it to support. Also, the 225e's treble is more agreeable to my ears, although the 325e was really nice. I think that these two headphones are roughly comparable in terms of musicality, despite the 225e's substantially lower cost.

I know the new series may be different but I found the 225e to be my personal favourite of the Prestige range and I predict that after burn in the 225x will be a very musical headphone (my 225e's had a somewhat harsh upper midrange/highs and I thought they were defective until fully burned in, they have sounded great and natural since).


Interested to know how the 225x sounds! Enjoy!
 
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May 24, 2021 at 11:38 PM Post #47,479 of 66,259
Hey guys, just received the SR325X for review and had a chance to compare them to the SR325E. Also will be expecting some parts from Turbulent Labs, excited to experiment with these.

Cosmetically, not much has changed. The cups, sliders, all the same. While the lower models get a padded faux leather band, the 325 has the same unpadded authentic leather band as the E, just with white stitching. The cable is updated too, with a techflex sheath. It's the same thickness and still pretty stiff, though I did notice it helps to prevent the cups from spinning and twisting up the cable above the Y-split which is neat.

Sonically, things become more interesting. The SR325X swaps out L-Cush for flat pads. It's immediately more balanced with a better, more accurate midrange timbre, in particular. There's even some warmth and gusto here, it's very different.

Swapping the flat pads onto the E model and we can see this isn't just a pad change too. The X model has better bass extension, more oomph in the mid-bass and lower mids. The midrange sounds more even with less peakiness around the upper mids especially. While it does relinquish the clarity and separation of the E, the X sounded more natural and forgiving to me.

Conversely, swapping the L-Cush pads onto the X redeems some of that classic Grado house sound. I think fans of the original will like this more granular change as you still get the airy, open top end and revealing mids but with noticeably more bass power and a bit more vocal body, less hollowness and strain.

Will consolidate more thoughts coming up to the full review... Enjoy some beauty shots in the interim, Jon is definitely onto something, these have a timeless design that was a pleasure to photograph.

IMG_20210524_120657_215.jpg
 
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May 25, 2021 at 11:41 AM Post #47,481 of 66,259
Night off work , time for some Grado action . I'm still blown away by how good the eGrado sounds out of my old samsung phone , I use it everyday for my portable .

In clockwise order - eGrado , RS1e , SR325e , RS2e , SR80e
 

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May 25, 2021 at 3:01 PM Post #47,486 of 66,259
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