Rob, one of the cups on my PS1000 has some tiny black specks as well. I noticed a little while ago that the Headroom website specifically says they won't accept returns of PS1000s for cosmetic reasons (I didn't buy mine from them). I decided from the get-go that I would put up with these minor imperfections, though I am troubled by the fact that Grado is not covering Piotr's shipping costs and that it apparently will take so long to repair his phones (two months, I understand, before he gets his back). For $1700, that is unforgivable. What can Grado be thinking? That everyone has this kind of money to throw around?
I was thinking, if there's a few tiny black specks now on one of the cups, even if I had received a "perfect" pair, I don't think they'd stay that way forever. Plus, I'm not keen on sending my cans back to Grado for two months to get them to give me a perfect looking pair of cups - partially at my shipping expense. I'll give Grado, very reluctantly, the benefit of the doubt and say the tiny specks reflect the "home brew" nature of these cans, but at the price they're charging, I'm being really generous in that assessment. The sound, however, is right where it should be, and that is what really counts.
To once again stoke the PS1000 vs. HD800 flames, I mentioned before that Sennheiser's service puts Grado's absolutely to shame. I posted it elsewhere, but the long and short of my post was that a certain Sennheiser "authorized dealer" (no names) sold me at a full-price a "pre-owned" or "pre-registered" pair of HD800s, but did not tell me this. Sennheiser Germany confirmed my suspicions when they sent me an e-mail informing me that the serial number I had registered had been registered to someone else. I went straight to SennUSA, and on the spot, they told me they were sending me replacement phones, which I received two days later. If that's not great customer service, I don't know what is. Not only that, though, but Sennheiser sent me a return UPS mailing authorization label, and told me I didn't even need to return the first set of HD800s until I'd received the replacements.
Grado may be a small, family-owned company, but at the prices they charge, they owe much better service to their customers than they do. They may have produced some great cans in the past, and their PS1000 and GS1000i are right up there with the best, but this is not an excuse to forego basic customer service. They must know that we'll keep buying their phones anyway, so they just don't care. Sad. Very sad.
I'm the proof of it - I still love the PS1000s, tiny black specks and all.