If there's one thing I HATE it's when reviewers try to be "cute" or to turn every review of a component into a story about themselves!! GRRRRRR......
Nevertheless, here's the bottom line:
" So what does the Melos SHA-1/Grado headphones combo sound like?
Like it is. That's all I can come up with; the Melos amp and the Grado headphones are the most revealing, detailed, transparent listening tool I've yet heard. Bar none. The "best" speakers and amplifiers can present an amazing illusion of reality in a good-sounding room, but nothing I've heard comes as close to telling you exactly what the audio signal sounds like as the Melos/Grado setup. Not the Apogee Grands, not the IRS Vs, not the B&W 800s. Not even the excellent $2000 Stax SR-Lambda Signatures with their tubed driver circuit, which I find to sound less "see-through" than the $1500 Melos/Grado rig I'm listening to as I write.
No matter what recordings I listened to, the Melos/Grado combination revealed information and detail I hadn't heard before. I must have listened to Jimi Hendrix's Electric Ladyland at least a thousand times over the years, but I heard hidden details like buried overdubs, weird reverb tails, drum-kit rattles, wholesale phasing manipulation, and countless other little buried treasures that were all new to me. As I said before in my Rotel CD player review in Vol.15 No.3, listening with the Grados is like looking with a high-power microscope; everything, and I mean everything that your signal source sends down the line is laid out in naked, obvious detail. Free of the listening-room echoes and reverberant wash and amp/speaker colorations that obscure this kind of detail in even the best systems and rooms, the Melos/Grado combo comes closest to the paradigm of just simply plugging your interconnects into your ears than anything else I've heard.
Listening to Electric Ladyland , I heard stuff like Jimi talking to the rest of the musicians in the studio at the very start of "Rainy Day, Dream Away"; over speakers, I can just barely hear some extremely low-level talking going on, and it's hard to tell just who it is doing the talking, but the Melos/Grados allowed me to not only identify Jimi's voice, but to actually hear what he was saying quite clearly and easily. And at the very end of "1983: A Merman I Should Turn To Be," I heard for the first time some breakthrough guitar tracks that poked through the sounds of the spaceship circling Earth for the last time before the track fades into the lead-out groove. I sat there thinking, "This is crazy!" There should have been nothing on Electric Ladyland that's escaped my notice after all these years of intensive digging, but there it was, song after song: guitars and bass and voices and sound effects that I was hearing for the very first time. It was almost like listening to a brand-new record, and exciting beyond words.
So while I confess astonishment at the high level of resolution that the Melos SHA-1 and the Grado headphones possess, I have to throw in this li'l warning not to take this review as an endorsement of the Great Detail Safari. The Melos/Grados duo is a powerful listening tool, but it can actually end up being distracting if you're so bowled over by all the heretofore hidden detail you don't hear the music as a whole."
Now, if only they'd add the review of the SHA-Gold Reference. I know they reviewed it, so it might have info that would help us all understand the difference between the SHA-1 and the SHA-Gold Reference.
I have submitted an e-mail to Stereophile to request the re-print. You can request it too from Jon Iverson at:
iversonj@primediacmmg.com
markl
