Grado PS1000: The Legendary Flagship (Review)

[alota]

Quote:

The PS1000 is up there with the HD800, T1, HE6, LCD-2.
 

pity that, when you raise the pot, the ps-1000 returns downwards

 

[SHAHZADA123]

The PS1000 is up there with the HD800, T1, HE6, LCD-2.

I beg to differ.
With the right amp, EAR HP-4, or at least the ECBA, the PS1000 is quite a few notches above them

 

[majkel]

For me the PS1000 and the HE-6 are about equal, with the right amps, but I prefer Grado due to less "ornaments" and faster sound. The HD800 is below, LCD-2 and T1 even lower.

 

[shimmer n roar]

Quote:

 
GS1000 warning note on GradoLabs.com
 
"

By creating this "room" for the ears to sit, positioning of the cushions with regards to the ears (i.e., forward or back) is somewhat critical in finding the absolute sweet spot." (http://www.gradolabs.com/page_headphones.php?item=fa25fd0be6abcd040b8093b9915a2126)
 
Sony Q010-MDR1 (Qualia 010) measurements on Headroom:

 
 

 

I repeat, these are US$2400 Qualia 010 measurements!
 
Crappy isn't it? It doesn't make sense at all don't it? What are you going to do about it? Those are in no way indicative of the (very) highly regarded listening experience the user/owner at the end is going to get (unanimously positive on Head-Fi). Why? No idea, but here's a simple hypothesis: Qualia 010 design philosophy, pads, headband(s), driver angling, and the principles behind just about every other components and materials have all have been pushed further and beyond limit, in order to maximize the performance of the headphone, which ultimately leads sound quality. The Qualia line of Sony products is a statement and a boutique to showcase their best and what they were truly capable off. They took their best TVs, camcorder, minidisc player, video processor, projector, and even the bacterial yogurt MDR-R10 drivers and improved upon them! That is research and development and material, acoustic, electronic, physical (and more) sciences coupled with some great engineering and technological know-how Japan is well reputed for, all on the same table, and yes, you have no idea how much everything about them has been measured and re-measured, both the parts independently and when put together, in laboratories far more sophisticated than ours.
 
In this case the problem is probably the fit on the standardized head and microphone-ears. This headphones as always been said to be one of the most fit-dependent, which is to be expected when you're dealing with a technological marvel designed by following very strictly and applying very rigidly only the best proven principles.
 
It's only an hypothesis. It seems like the tester didn't struggle that much with placement of the headphones according to the repeated and staying similar raw frequency response curves.
 
What if the qualities of the Qualia 010 transcends everything our limited eyes can understand from looking at a narrowed down sample of it under the microscope? Headphone measurement is, by definition, a radical departure from the usual holistic approach that is to simply listen to it, to a top-down analysis of its function into parameters readable by a computer with the use of test tones, frequency swipes, noise and square waves in order to make a very limited assertion about how an isolated pure tone is reproduced in relation to the rest of the band, how much the harmonics of the fundamental frequency are being excited, and how fast it then decays. It's not much, but we've found a way of representing it all with curves on a sheet. We managed to disassemble the sound, but the other way around is still impossible, no one knows of how to put back the exploded pieces together find the initial sound. We think we can tell the good headphones from the bad ones, yet headphone measurements doesn't tell us a single darn thing about how it's going to function in nature --when playing back music--, and in an ecological context --when our head and in relation to our hearing sense and psychological representation of the stimuli (and NO I'm not talking about subjectivity and personal bias! I'm talking about the way our brain transforms alternating density air fronts and excitation of cochlea's ciliated cells into a note, how harmonics are taken into account etc.).
 
PS-1000 measures better than the Sony Qualia 010, therefore, PS-1000 is a great headphone, yay!
 
I could end my post this way, but I won't.
 
How absurd, meaningless, and blinded is that? Yet we see and make such statements every day on Head-Fi... only a very few of us really takes measurements found on Innerfidelity with the HUGE deserved grain of salt Tyll is warning us about everywhere.
 
People shouldn't even be allowed to make assertion about a headphone's sound when they never heard it...
 
What is the ideal frequency response curve? what does non-linear harmonic distortion sounds like? how come the Fostex TH900 sounds less bassy than a LCD-3 (have you seen their measurements?!) how come even the most hardened objectivists also enjoy and sometimes prefer poorly measuring headphones and feels sympathy toward others who like to have a bit of sparkly sounding resonance in the highs, while despising and fighting to eradicate all resonance from the face of the earth at the same time?
 
When you look to threads in the 2005, people called Grado's bass accurate and natural, soundstage realistic, as opposed to fake and artificially tridimensional, detail extraction unprecedented and superior to every other headphones and its instrument rendering and sheer musicality/emotion was like a dream come true, a music performance brought to life. The RS-1 (Grado's flagship at the time) was popular and regularly thought of by Grado's experienced, dedicated and persevering fan-/userbase as the best dynamic phone ever (yes, above the MDR-R10, can you believe me? I will give you threads to read straight away and you will have no choice but to). Now that measurements are all over the place, though the headphones themselves remained virtually unchanged, people's idea of their sound changed... Grados are now being called names: "U-shaped", "rolled-off", "peaky", "distorted", "noisy/resonant"... and yet we have no idea of how these concepts impacts the sound of real music, as played back by a headphone. We use these words on a regular basis to describe the sound of a headphone, yet we don't know to which extent it is a substance that is represented in the sound of our headphones or if it is something our brain can even perceive. Personally, I believe that it's not, both questions, and that we're all making that up. There's no way, not even a chance a 2005 Grado owner could have imagined such fantasies...
 
Headphone measuring is a science in its infancy, and we know so little about it, as a science. The more we progress in the field of measuring our own headphones, the more those who are ahead of the movement realize how the barrier between measurements and actual sound reproduction is vague in size and imprecisely shaped and placed --but surely enough, it's there--, and how its definite presence, extension and impact should not be "reducted" (by reductionism) or mitigated during the interpretation of any measurements. Testing a headphone in a lab and listening to music are two radically different activities, and the results they produce still doesn't correlate together at all; let's not crush our own dreams implying that they do!

 
i share your sentiments. i think the obsession with headphone measurements that some head-fi'ers display is misguided. i'm not anti-measurement either but my interest in them has been as a guide, and not as the premise to argue why one headphone is better than another. what i find astonishing is when people become embroiled in these arguments over a headphone's performance based entirely on the graphs and without actually having heard it. i think i have a competent grasp of headphone measurements, but i've found that they are no substitute for auditioning a headphone. the purpose of a headphone is to be heard.

 

[Focker]

Quote:

 
i share your sentiments. i think the obsession with headphone measurements that some head-fi'ers display is misguided. i'm not anti-measurement either but my interest in them has been as a guide, and not as the premise to argue why one headphone is better than another. what i find astonishing is when people become embroiled in these arguments over a headphone's performance based entirely on the graphs and without actually having heard it. i think i have a competent grasp of headphone measurements, but i've found that they are no substitute for auditioning a headphone. the purpose of a headphone is to be heard.

 
Agreed. To each their own, but I just could never allow the measurements to govern my opinion of a headphone. There hasn't yet been an occasion where I didn't want to KNOW the measurements, but it's more of  curiosity thing and a way for me to correlate my subjective preferences with the objective data. It just seems like there are a lot of people who will use the measurements to describe their subjective experience, and I have to call B.S. on that. It's akin to knowing the answer to a test question, and then pretending all along you knew the answer without seeing it ahead of time. It's just weird how there almost seems to be pressure among head-fi'ers to be able to validate their subjective opinions about a headphone with objective data. Why is it so taboo these days to simply be able to enjoy something simply because it's enjoyable? Not everything in life needs to be "proved" for gosh sakes. 

 

[devouringone3]

Quote:
 
After reading your argument exchanges with Purrin in the TH900 impression thread I realized things such as:
-- Some headphone just produce less (super slow) bass; how do you expect them to push a 30 Hz signal to a 90 dB or even 100 dB intensity you tell me? of course there will be distortion! your torturing the drivers
 
90 dB loud pure tone bass near the threshold of human hearing is never present in the music we listen to, it's not even to be found in an audiologist's cabin (they start testing your audition at like 125 or 250 Hz). It's lewdness to say some people "likes" to listen to distortion and resonance when these aberrances are most likely not there, when you listen to your music.
 
What do you learn from that about a headphone's ability reproduce music, at the end of the day? well other than for it's overall frequency response (though I'm not even sure about that anymore since the advent of the "face pounding deep and broad super bass on the graph, yet moderate to the ears" TH900), I don't know.
 
I'm not even sure a 20 air compression/decompression cycles per second wave (or 30 Hz) is really present in any musical instruments, or how loud does bass needs to be reproduced to be representative of the quantity there is in real life. Bass reproduction on a graph resembles more to a marketing gimmick, or to a way to convince speakers people to buy headphones, than to something we hear.
 
 
What frustrates me the most is that some people makes it appear (or look) like if there were more bad headphones than good ones, when in reality no headphone (especially in the top tiers) are... "bad". The neural satisfaction you get from listening to a headphone you searched, read about, and purchased is in another psychological corridor (than the auditory pathway anyway) altogether. It's in its comfort, it's in its look, in its look on you, its price tag, it's everywhere and all over the place, it's in the reactions your family and friends to it, it's in the good looking face of the Best Buy vendor, maybe in its words, maybe in its "choice of words", it's in the box used for the packaging of the headphones, etc. the latter examples are more about some headphones called Beats, but the analogy still prevails, to some extent, to us on Head-Fi buying headphones, and that, very few are ready to acknowledge it... but it's another completely different topic from headphone measurements, oops.

 

[Tyll Hertsens]

Quote:

 
There hasn't yet been an occasion where I didn't want to KNOW the measurements, but it's more of  curiosity thing and a way for me to correlate my subjective preferences with the objective data. It just seems like there are a lot of people who will use the measurements to describe their subjective experience, and I have to call B.S. on that. 

 
^^^This.  I haven't quite yet figured out how to put it clearly in words, but it's something quite like the above.
 
Measurements are quantifying something that's really there, but the measurements aren't measuring the experience we have. When I experience the headphones, being able to look at the measurements brings greater clarity to the understanding of my experience, but (hopefully) it doesn't change or define my experience. 

 

[Focker]

Quote:

 
^^^This.  I haven't quite yet figured out how to put it clearly in words, but it's something quite like the above.
 
Measurements are quantifying something that's really there, but the measurements aren't measuring the experience we have. When I experience the headphones, being able to look at the measurements brings greater clarity to the understanding of my experience, but (hopefully) it doesn't change or define my experience. 

 
Right on, Tyll. 
 
BTW, you know you're in a Grado thread? You better be careful you don't start melting or floating to the ceiling. 

 

[ultrabike]

I know this tread is about the PS-1000, but since we are talking measurements:
 
I'll like to relate how I found measurements useful. Originally, my best headphones where a pair of HD202s. I knew these where not the best headphones out there. But they had plenty of good reviews based on price/performance ratio. I didn't know, or cared, how they measured. After convincing myself that reference large full range speakers were not a practical solution for me, I decided to give headphones a much more serious look.
 
The first thing I did was buy a set of Audeo PFEs in an effort to find my portable reference transducer. Found them to be bass lean, but otherwise superior to my HD202s in every way by a large margin. By this time I was aware about SPL FR measurements and understood why they, in theory, offered value to purchase decision making. Eventually I gave up on them (and any IEM), because of comfort issues (can't run with them either - occulsion effect).
 
Second thing I did was buy a DT990. Subjectively they were described as strong bass and tremble. Measurements correlated to the subjective description. I wanted the bass and comfort that was absent in my Audeo's, and felt that these should be much superior to my HD202s in every way. I was warned by both measurements and subjective reviews that these might be too bright and mid recessed. I said to myself, if I can take the HD202s, DT990 should fit the bill... Wrong. They were too bright, and the excess bass and tremble masked a lot of detail present in my music. Took a look at my HD202s measurements here and there and found that while a complete fail on accuracy, they were not that unpleasant to me probably because they are easy on the tremble. In fact, they are tremble recessed.
 
Third thing I did was take a look at the KSC75s. I could run with those and according to some, they sound like Grados. Looked at the measurements and they did seem to measured somewhat like Grados. Bright and punchy, but definitively not as bright as my DT990. For $15 I gave them a try. Wow. Just wow. A very enjoyable set of mini pancakes. Better than my DT990 in the sense that they were not as tremble painful and by far superior to my HD202s (at least to me.) Very portable as well. Measurements helped in figuring these ones out.
 
By now I have read all over measurements and listening impressions, and have a better understanding as to what measurement signature I may like. I started to become more interested on the HD5xx cans (again) given their measurements and praise (also very affordable.) Luckily they had them (HD558) on display at Best Buy along other cans. Took a listen to them and compared them with what they had there. Loved them and got them. Superior to my HD202s, KSC-75s, and much easier to listen than my parted DT990 (as measurements predicted). Can't say they are superior to my parted Audeos, but definitively more bass quantity (which I like), and much more comfortable. Measurements indicate that these are smooth in the tremble compared to my parted DT990, and don't have large notches in the audio band like my KSC-75.
 
Do I feel measurements correlate with my satisfaction? Yes. Call it bias, but that's how a felt and feel. I found that I like smooth tremble and no notches in the audio band. I do miss my Audeo's in the sense that when bass equalized, they provided incredibly clean bass compared to everything else I have owned. Based on this I feel that a deep and clean orthodynamic might deliver even more quality to my ears.
 
So to me measurements are a guide. However, I also feel that measurements will not replace your own, by ear, personal evaluation of a headphone. For example, I really liked the Stax SR-404 quite a bit, and I've seen measurements indicating a little bumpy tremble. Moreover, I liked a DT990-600 out of a Schiit Asgard, and I've yet to know why.

 

[Focker]

That's exactly why I've really come to make Tyll's reviews required reading. I tend to have very different taste than what he has, but his measurements and data are extremely useful in terms of the research I do prior to making decisions on what to listen to. Clearly we can't audition every single headphone on the market, so what Tyll does is invaluable. 

 

[shimmer n roar]

Quote:

 
^^^This.  I haven't quite yet figured out how to put it clearly in words, but it's something quite like the above.
 
Measurements are quantifying something that's really there, but the measurements aren't measuring the experience we have. When I experience the headphones, being able to look at the measurements brings greater clarity to the understanding of my experience, but (hopefully) it doesn't change or define my experience. 

 i can assure you tyll that you are definitely not one of the measurement extremists that i am referring to.

i respect your balanced perspective.

 

[stacker45]

Quote:

 
Agreed. To each their own, but I just could never allow the measurements to govern my opinion of a headphone. There hasn't yet been an occasion where I didn't want to KNOW the measurements, but it's more of  curiosity thing and a way for me to correlate my subjective preferences with the objective data. It just seems like there are a lot of people who will use the measurements to describe their subjective experience, and I have to call B.S. on that. It's akin to knowing the answer to a test question, and then pretending all along you knew the answer without seeing it ahead of time. It's just weird how there almost seems to be pressure among head-fi'ers to be able to validate their subjective opinions about a headphone with objective data. Why is it so taboo these days to simply be able to enjoy something simply because it's enjoyable? Not everything in life needs to be "proved" for gosh sakes. 

 
This thread needs a bump,if only to say that i agree with you %100,i don't listen to measurements,i listen to music,if i'd have gone with graphs,i'd never would have wanted to try the PS-500,because according to the mesurements it looks like they hardly producing any high frequency,and altough they don't have the treble extension of the PS-1000 for example,they have a very sweet treble,everything is there,it's just not ''in your face'' as much,the 500's ''polite'' treble can even work to it's advantage with harsh recordings. 

 

[Focker]

Quote:

 
This thread needs a bump,if only to say that i agree with you %100,i don't listen to measurements,i listen to music,if i'd have gone with graphs,i'd never would have wanted to try the PS-500,because according to the mesurements it looks like they hardly producing any high frequency,and altough they don't have the treble extension of the PS-1000 for example,they have a very sweet treble,everything is there,it's just not ''in your face'' as much,the 500's ''polite'' treble can even work to it's advantage with harsh recordings. 

 
Thanks, and I agree that the 500s are a perfect example. I don't really care for "dark" headphones...I tend to prefer either neutral or bright, and after looking at the graph I was wondering if the 500s would really be my cup of tea, especially after loving the 325s so much. Well, as it turns out I didn't only like them, but they're my favorite headphone to date. I'm glad we have the objective data, but my ears are the judge and jury. I just think about how I may have entirely missed out on my love affair with Grados if I allowed only measurements to guide my decision making.

 

[Gradofan2]

Quote:

I'm just amazed at the clarity and detail of the PS1000's - they're staging, imaging and positioning are spectacular.  
 
But... their incredible resolution will no doubt "unmask" a lot of recordings, which go "masked" in phones with lesser resolution.  Some will no doubt attribute the "course sound" of some (perhaps many) recordings to the PS1000's, when it really is their incredible resolution, clarity, staging, imaging and positioning, which does not permit recordings to sound as cohesive, and smooth as lesser phones do.   
 
http://www.head-fi.org/t/520884/ps1000-appreciation-thread/332

 
Forget the metrics... the more I listen to both the PS1000's and PS500's (and... oh yes... the RS-1's) out of the WA6 SEm... the more I'm amazed by their superb sound, in all respects!  Just amazing compared to all others I've tried.  And... they're superb for listening at low levels - refined clarity, resolution and detail... which sounds like real live music!    Component matching is what its all about with Grados - when properly matched, they have no strident highs, and are just about perfect in all respects.  

 

[vinyllp33]

When I had my WA6SE Maxxed it provided some of the best sound I heard from my PS1000's.

Truly a world-class rig!