Hi
Somebody could compare grado gs1000i vs gs3000e?
Cheers
I got a GS3000e from my local Grado dealer the week before last for testing at home. I was very curious after the reports here on head-fi how it would perform against my beloved GS1000i. It is a demo unit from the German Grado distributor and has already been running for 100 hours, as the dealer told me. I tested it with my McIntosh chain: MCD500 with MHA150. The Macs sound very clean and transparent with a slight touch of warmth in the keynote and with a deep and powerful bass. For crosschecking I also used my McIntosh vintage tube chain. The chosen music was Alternative Country and Blues also the new album from Sting - my songs.
The result of the comparison test somehow surprised me:
The GS3000e was, as already described here several times, of course in the midrange about two quality levels better than the GS1000i. The mids were more present, more voluminous and better contoured. However, in some recordings I noticed a peak in the upper midrange, which was a bit annoying especially with voices and guitars. The 3000 is also clearly superior to the 1000 in terms of three-dimensionality and is much more involving into the music than the 1k.
What really surprised me was that I liked the GS1000i much better than the GS3000e at both ends of the frequency range. Drum cymbals are much more audible and the bass has more volume and punch, which is of course due to the increase in upper bass on the 1000. But I had more fun with this bass. Overall I found the 1k more transparent but also thinner in sound. A crosscheck with the tube combination gave the same result, even though the bass roll-off of the 3k was not as big as with the MHA150.
Since it is known that unplayed Grados typically have a thin and set-back bass, I decided to burn in the GS3000e again with a good burn in CD. After 80 hours of playing in I could not detect any change in the sound of the GS3000e. I know that the impressions I've described here differ from what has been written so far about GS3000e and GS1000i. But I have only described my personal perception.