[Bilavideo]

 

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I'm no Bilavideo, I'm no woodworker and I'm no genious. I am a freshman in college studing a liberal arts curriculum

 
And I'm no genius either, but my IT degree did acquaint me with the humble spell checker
 
(ok, typos happen, but of all the words it had to happen to - keep this up and you could very well end up in an Apple Store )

Well, I am Bilavideo and I'm no woodworker and I'm definitely no genius, either.  I'm just a 45-year-old kid in a candy store.  You all help me feel like I'm not alone in getting caught up in the existential pleasures of audio bliss - and I'm glad you do.

 

[estreeter]

A tad too modest, methinks, BV - HF is often derided elsewhere as 'the place where people who couldnt fit two 12-volts into a torch criticise your circuit topology'. I believe you are one of the HFiers who most definitely *could* fit those pesky 12-volts into the torch. Personally, I would spend most of the morning just trying to find the %#^! torch ....
 
Now, where did I leave my wallet ?

 

[purrin]

 
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With respect to harmonic distortion graphs and other forms of data, keep in mind that what's being analyzed is a whole system, not a driver.  An SR60/SR80 is going to generate a different reading than a 225 or 325.  Be that as it may, here are some graphs.  What leaps out to you? ... The big spikes on this graph seem to be those of the 325. Was the goal to get as many of these in as possible?

 
 
First of all, none of the graphs you showed me had anything close to resembling what I was suggesting. However, lets just use the 500Hz tone HD graph, where I should point out that the spikes are not just limited to the SR325 (the spikes on for the other models are just as tall, but obscured behind the yellow SR325 line). These large spikes are the 500Hz fundamental, 1000Hz 2nd order, and 3000Hz 3rd order. This is not necessarily what we are looking for - the interesting thing of note is how much lower the "floor" of the distortion is of the SR325 compared to the others (although what's surprising is how dirty the SR225 is, but I wonder if this is an aberration.)
 

 
This floor is audible and consistent with my experiences with the better Grado drivers. In my speaker building experience, enclosures don't affect the distortion floor of drivers that much - what they tend to do is to ignite resonances - create bumps in areas where the enclosure vibrate at - and only at certain tones. Now it is certainly possible that the metal/plastic hybrid driver contributes quite a bit to keep the distortion floor low (more on this later).
 
Now to get more complete picture, we would need HD graphs not just at 500Hz, but at 50Hz, 100Hz, 300Hz, 750Hz, 1 KHz, 2KHz, 5Khz, etc. Throwing in some tri-tones and looking at the distortion would be nice too. And I haven't even mentioned CSD graphs which IMO better illustrate sound quality (no the HR impulse response graphs are not the same thing.) For example, here's a CSD of the LCD-2 (it's basically fricking amazing and a good reason why people are freaking out over them):
 

 

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  I remain unconvinced that there is anything, in the drivers themselves, that predermines how far they can be modded to make a better headphone.
 

 
 
Finally, I never said you couldn't better the design. I just said you can't make SR80s sound like or have the detail level of an SR325. I think you can approach it, but IMO, the gap in driver quality will be too big to overcome with mods, especially since the SR325s have hybrid metal/plastic cups, which have a very particular influence on the sound signature. (I've noted the metal cup models: SR325, HF-2, and PS-1000 are the most dynamic of all the Grados.)
 
Now if you had made you target the SR225, I would be more apt to agree, but I'm convinced the SR325 series on up have significantly upgraded drivers over the Prestige series where the gap would be too large to bridge with "mods". (This is probably our biggest difference of speculation.)
 
Finally, as I intimated above, I'm convinced that the SR325 sound requires an aluminum housing of some sort. CNC milling of metal isn't exactly cheap. Assuming you could somehow could figure out the magic formula to take SR80s and reconstruct them to sound like SR325s, the aluminum housings (that are a good part of its sound) would probably make their construction infeasible in terms of costs. Therefore the answer to the OP's question:
 
No. Unless you wish to follow the path of Leonidus I or Bilavideo. 

  But as to your point to the OP that you can definitely improve upon the SR-60/80, I definitely agree with.

 

[purrin]

 
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Its just a simple question not to be blown out of proportion, lol
 

 
LOL, Bill and I are friends are we like to get into once in a while. It's head-fi, and we've got little kids in the house and are probably bored this time of the year (my business slows down dramatically around now.) It's all in good spirit and I do this in part to get him to share his knowledge.
 
There's been suspicion for the longest time that the Grado drivers are the same or if not very similar to each other along the entire line.
 

 

[Bilavideo]

Purrin, you didn't disappoint.  When it came time for somebody to step up and give the other side of the argument, you were there - even if it was while crawling out of that giant hole we constructed in the middle of the palace, if only to toss in our eggshells and our guests.  
 
Since you brought up the noise floor, let's take another look.
 

 
The SR325 does have a lower noise floor than all of the other Prestige Grados.  It's also the only one with an aluminum second-stage chamber.  In the meantime, how far from it is the SR60 - with its plastic chamber, total lack of damping, plastic rear grill and lack of UHPLC wire in either the voice coil or connecting cable?  For much of the graph, it's in second place!  In the meantime, take a look at the higher Grados and their noise floor.
 

 
 
Are my eyes deceiving me or do the 325 and PS1000 occupy the very bottom of the chart with the lowest sound floors while the GS1000 has the highest sound floor - higher, in fact, than the SR60?  What was it the SR325 and the PS1000 had in common?  It's right on the tip of my tongue.

 

[Bilavideo]

Just for fun . . . .

 
Atta boy, SR60!  Run with the big dogs!  Notice how well the SR60 performs until you get to the treble zone.  What would happen if you swapped out the comfies for bowls and turned it into an SR80? How would an SR80 fare in the treble zone against the big dogs? (Note: I'm leaving out the RS1, RS2, SR325 and PS1000 for a reason.)
 

 

[Bilavideo]

 

Quote:

 
Its just a simple question not to be blown out of proportion, lol
 

 
LOL, Bill and I are friends are we like to get into once in a while. It's head-fi, and we've got little kids in the house and are probably bored this time of the year (my business slows down dramatically around now.) It's all in good spirit and I do this in part to get him to share his knowledge.
 
There's been suspicion for the longest time that the Grado drivers are the same or if not very similar to each other along the entire line.
 

Purrin is right.  We are friends and have been for a while now.  He's one of the smartest people I know on HeadFi and I am greatly honored and fortunate to have had the benefit of that friendship.  Don't anybody call the cops.  We're just wrestling on the front lawn.

 

[purrin]

 
 
 
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I guess I am trying to get at what are the technical differences between the 60 vs 325 inside. Drivers, Coil, Cable etc...
 

 
 
Those are trade secrets only known to Grado. A lot of people think of Grado has a headphone company. To me, what comes to mind is phono cartridges (with their tiny precision windings). Grado relied on their existing knowledge and expertise with phono cartridges to make headphones. I personally suspect there are three levels of drivers where the construction is largely similar: 1) SR60 to SR225; 2) SR325 to RS1; 3) GS/PS1000. I suspect the voice coils have noticeable differences among these three levels (more turns/ windings, different gauge wires, different materials, etc.) just like their phono cartridges. This conjecture are based on this scant piece of data (I didn't add the RS1 graph since it was essentially the same as the SR325 graph):
 

 
Other differences may be diaphragm material, coatings, etc. I know the diaphragms look different on SR80, HF-2, and PS1000 (I don't have my RS series any more so I can't comment). The GS/PS series are known for more boom than the rest of the other series - this is reflected in their impedance curves which are different (difficult to see because of the low resolution of the graph below) which indicates mechanical / electrical differences.
 

 
I know Bill, you've sort of poo-poo'ed the quality of copper ("UHPLC") used in the voice coils as marketing hype, but small differences in quality of voice coil wire do make a difference, especially when you are multiplying the effects of the wire thousands fold (the number of turns to wind the wire into a coil to generate the magnetic fields necessary for moving the diaphragm)

 

 

[purrin]

 

Are my eyes deceiving me or do the 325 and PS1000 occupy the very bottom of the chart with the lowest sound floors while the GS1000 has the highest sound floor - higher, in fact, than the SR60?  What was it the SR325 and the PS1000 had in common?  It's right on the tip of my tongue.

 
I've too thought about the effect of the metal cans, but here you see the RS1 with its wooden cup having a lower floor to the SR325. Also note how the 3rd harmonic (bad) of the of the RS1/2 is quite a bit lower than the SR325 (probably explains some on why the SR325 is considered the most in-your-face Grado). Too put things in perspective, we are working with horrible data with low granularity.
 

 

[Bilavideo]

 
[size=medium]

Originally Posted by purrin /img/forum/go_quote.gif
 
I personally suspect there are three levels of drivers where the construction is largely similar: 1) SR60 to SR225; 2) SR325 to RS1; 3) GS/PS1000. I suspect the voice coils have noticeable differences among these three levels (more turns/ windings, different gauge wires, different materials, etc.) just like their phono cartridges. This conjecture are based on this scant piece of data (I didn't add the RS1 graph since it was essentially the same as the SR325 graph):
 

​

[/size]

The SR80 in the above graph is being run up against aluminum Grados.  Couldn't that lower noise floor just be a function of the aluminum chambers?
 

 
Again, while the inclusion of the SR225 in this graph is just there to make me laugh some more (at the 225 Mafia), didn't the GS1000 have the benefit of all this special wire, all these special coats and all these special windings?  Yet, it gets consistently beaten at the lower end by the SR60 and then beaten at the higher end by the SR80!

 

[purrin]

 
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Atta boy, SR60!  Run with the big dogs!  Notice how well the SR60 performs until you get to the treble zone.  What would happen if you swapped out the comfies for bowls and turned it into an SR80? How would an SR80 fare in the treble zone against the big dogs? (Note: I'm leaving out the RS1, RS2, SR325 and PS1000 for a reason.)
 

LOL, you're not allowed to selectively leave data out!
 
Actually, the GS1000 sounds "dirty" to me. It's one of the first things I noticed when I got my PS1000 and did a re-comparison between them and the HF-2.The SR225 graph I can't explain - I've listened to them but never owned them.

 

[Bilavideo]

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I've too thought about the effect of the metal cans, but here you see the RS1 with its wooden cup having a lower floor to the SR325. Also note how the 3rd harmonic (bad) of the of the RS1/2 is quite a bit lower than the SR325 (probably explains some on why the SR325 is considered the most in-your-face Grado). Too put things in perspective, we are working with horrible data with low granularity.
 

Yes and no.  At the lower end of the spectrum, the 325 is more consistently the one with the lowest floor.  The RS1 doesn't establish dominance until you get into the treble.  And this is in spite of all the sandbags laid against this $300 headphone when doing battle with the $700 RS1.  The RS1 gets a mahogany front end, where the 325 starts out in plastic.  The RS1 gets some serious damping on the magnet back.  The RS1 doesn't have a plastic ring reflecting who-knows-what down near the rear grill, nor does it have a hard-plastic button stuck smack dab in the middle of the rear grill.  Given these obstacles, I'd say the aluminum 325 does fairly well.

 

[purrin]

      Quote:

Originally Posted by Bilavideo /img/forum/go_quote.gif
 
...didn't the GS1000 have the benefit of all this special wire, all these special coats and all these special windings?  Yet, it gets consistently beaten at the lower end by the SR60 and then beaten at the higher end by the SR80!
 

 
We need CSDs. I'd wager that the waterfall plots of the GS1000 drivers look much better than the lower lines. As I said above, I've alway felt the GS1000 to be a little bit dirty sounding - even compared to HF-2. If you claimed you could make SR80s sound similar to GS1000s, I might even believe you. Heck, when the GS1000s came out, weren't people saying they were tweaked RS-2 drivers put in a big wooden shell?

 

[purrin]

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Yes and no.  At the lower end of the spectrum, the 325 is more consistently the one with the lowest floor.  The RS1 doesn't establish dominance until you get into the treble.  And this is in spite of all the sandbags laid against this $300 headphone when doing battle with the $700 RS1.  The RS1 gets a mahogany front end, where the 325 starts out in plastic.  The RS1 gets some serious damping on the magnet back.  The RS1 doesn't have a plastic ring reflecting who-knows-what down near the rear grill, nor does it have a hard-plastic button stuck smack dab in the middle of the rear grill.  Given these obstacles, I'd say the aluminum 325 does fairly well.

 
My point was an argument against your hypothesis that the metal enclosure was largely responsible for the cleanliness of the HD graphs. Wood or metal doesn't have that much of an effect on HD.
 
Doesn't the SR325 also have the dynamat-like on it?
 

 

[Bilavideo]

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Atta boy, SR60!  Run with the big dogs!  Notice how well the SR60 performs until you get to the treble zone.  What would happen if you swapped out the comfies for bowls and turned it into an SR80? How would an SR80 fare in the treble zone against the big dogs? (Note: I'm leaving out the RS1, RS2, SR325 and PS1000 for a reason.)
 

LOL, you're not allowed to selectively leave data out!

Ah, but that's what you did at post #54 when you selectively ran the SR60 against aluminum Grados!  At least I left a note!  I wanted to show you that the lowly SR60/SR80 beat the former Grado flagship - the GS1000 - in tests of total harmonic distortion, which is quite a feat for a plastic Grado, especially when that Grado lacked the benefit of jumbo pads, fancy voice coil wire, backplate damping, a metal rear screen (without a hard-plastic button in its center) and without ten feet of fancy cable.
 
That was a moment to cherish.