The engineering team at Grado Labs has tweaked and experimented
incrementally for years on this one. I think I remember John asking various
folks what they thought of a prototype three or four years ago at a N.Y. Home
Entertainment Show. It was cute, with the oversized foam ear-cups, wires
adangle, resembling battery powered, electric earmuffs; but it didn’t sound
much different to me than the RS-1. Since then, Grado Labs has tweaked
and modified its way (in an educated version of trial and error) until it has
delivered their most excellent all-purpose headphone yet. Most excellent!!
We’re not talking Asti-Spumanti here: we’re talking vintage Moët. Party
hearty, dudes! More to the point, while I definitely get excited by
technological breakthroughs (like fiber-optic interconnect cables) or material
breakthroughs (like Palladium ribbon cables) — my wife, Grammy Dudious,
accuses me of being an “audio revolutionary” — I most value incremental
improvements on the tried and true ... over time. Grammy also accuses me
of being an “audio conservative.”

First, Grado Labs has taken their driver unit, proven over decades, and placed
it in a more massive, but still lightweight wooden housing. Next, they
designed a tea-cup shaped open-cell-foam ear-cup to distance the driver from
the ear drum. This creates a larger load on the driver, one that cursorily
measures to nearly four times the cubic volume of air between driver and
eardrum, compared with his previous flagship model, the RS-1 (3.5" diameter
by 1" deep, compared to 2.5" diameter by 0.5" deep. Do the math! pi, times
the radius squared, times the depth.).

Imagination time. Imagine a good loudspeaker with a full-range driver in a
sealed box. It has become a speaker designer’s truism that in a smaller box
such a speaker will not be able to deliver its deepest bass; the mid-bass will
have more peaks, hence more impact, and it will be loud. In a larger sealed
box it can have pretty deep bass (though not as deep as in a tuned and
ported box), the mid bass won’t have as much impact, and the overall
amplitude will decrease (measured in standard ways, with 2.83v input and the
microphone placed at one meter on axis) when compared with the same
driver in the smaller box.

Now, let’s play a somewhat more difficult imagination game for a moment.
Imagine the chamber between the headphone’s driver and the ear drum as a
model for the speaker enclosure, with the speaker firing outward toward the
room. I know it doesn’t work that way in real life, but think of it in reverse.
It might help. If the experience of loudspeaker designers holds up, just
placing the headphone driver in a nearly four-times-larger enclosure ought to
change the character of the sound, deepening the bass response, smoothing
out mid-bass peaks. At the Head-Fi International Meet in Queens this spring,
something like this experiment was tried, and most of the informal
participants reported that no great change in the sound quality was observed
with Grado’s larger foam ear-cups when swapping them for the smaller foam
pads of other headsets in the Grado line, those having the same sized center
cutout. Some even said the larger ear-cups were detrimental to the sound.
But John Grado wasn’t fazed. He began doing a new series of tweaks on the
driver, tweaks he won’t even discuss because they’re proprietary. What
happens at Grado Labs stays at Grado Labs.

I’m not sure what he’s done to his driver that makes it compatible with the
larger volume of air, but Grado has accomplished wonders. The driver is the
same old Grado driver that is in all his headphones: 32 ohm impedance, 98
dB per one millivolt, he claims. I found I couldn’t play the new flagship
models quite as loudly as the old flagships (the RS-1s, which could play
painfully loud) straight out of my Sony portable CD player. The driver might
lose two or three dB of loudness in an ear-cup that is nearly four times
greater in volume than the old ear-cup.

We do know his drivers improve in performance as one listens to the
headphones going up his price schedule. This, I think, parallels states of“tune”
in automobile engines by one manufacturer that might have the same displacement
but have increased performance due to auxiliary features; a 2-
liter engine may be fitted out with different timing, compression ratio,
transistorized hot spark ignition, carburetor air flow volume, exhaust volume
(cu.ft./minute), amount of valve lift, over-head cams, transmission torque
peak points, etc. etc. In other words, each group of drivers designated for
higher price-points in the Grado line gets more tweaking, more fit and finish,
more expensive labor-intensive hand operations performed on it, until
designated for production. The best drivers, by test, are matched to close
tolerances and mounted in Grado’s best headphones. It is Grado’s, and his
Chief Engineer, John Chapin’s experience and judgment in these things that
finally bring forth an audio masterpiece.

You might ask, “How can anyone call an industrial product a masterpiece?”.
Well, the gull-wing Mercedes sports coupe has been considered such and has
been on display in various museums since first produced in the ‘50s. Ever
been to the Smithsonian Museum? Maybe I’ll ask them what constitutes an
industrial masterpiece. Or maybe I should ask the Supreme Court Justice
who, when asked, “What constitutes pornography?” answered, “I know it
when I see it.” I knew the GS-1000 was a masterpiece from the first time I
heard it last spring at the Head-Fi Meet. My critical listening button was
pushed, and I was concentrating as hard as I could in a crowded, somewhat
noisy room. First, the bass was prodigious. The midrange was smooth and
clean with no typical anomalies I could discern, what I’d call “voice-friendly.”
The trebles were less peaky than the RS-1. This was obvious through very
old ears. And the imaging and sound-stage depth were unusually spot-on.
Relative to the RS-1, the GS-1000 was the solution to all its problems, and
the RS-1 is a helluva headphone.

Months later, after I received the review samples, I decided to take a peak at
the curves of the two Grados, and that of the Sennheiser 650 model as on
display at the HeadRoom website. Any one with any interest in headphones
owes a debt of gratitude to Tyll Hertsens for having the courage to publish
these curves on his site. I overlaid the three frequency/amplitude curves
upon each other. The midrange portion of the curves, from 200 Hz to 2,000
Hz, of all three were nearly identical. They each had very similar printouts.
But the Senn 650 had a pronounced lack of punch from 200 Hz down, while
the Grado RS-1 had a big plateau centered around 100 Hz, and a gentle rolloff
below 50 Hz. Where the two of them rolled off, the GS-1000 had a
significant rise, say from 150 Hz down.to around 30 Hz before it rolled off
sharply. I don’t know how the design exercise was executed, but if the goal
was to give the GS-1000 prodigious bass, it succeeded. As I said, the three midranges
were nearly identically flat, not more than a dB separating them from each other from
200 Hz to 2k Hz. Yet, the RS-1 has been viewed by its detractors as “brash,”
while the Senn 650 has been criticized for being too wanting of “sparkle and sheen,”
for being too restrained, too polite. Why this should be was answered in the treble
performance of the three. Looking at the trebles, what was characteristic of
the RS-1 were definite peaks of considerable height (five to ten dB) in the
treble; while the characteristic of the Senn 650 were dips of about the same
amplitude. The GS-1000, while it had a few serious peaks, was not as up and
down as either of the others, so I thought of it as sounding “smoother.”
Having my subjective judgments backed up by the HeadRoom curves has
given me a swelled head. I guess I’ve become a good listener. If you’ve a
mind to, you could check me out by going through the archives and rereading
my earlier reviews of the Grado and Sennheiser ‘phones.

My GS-1000 review samples arrived from Grado a while back, and after
putting them through all the tests I usually perform (How do they sound with
the lights on or off? With wine or beer?), the result is the GS-1000 has two
of the “house sound” Grado signature characteristics. It is rock solid in the
bass, and it’s very mellow (soprano-friendly, no ringing) in the midrange, with
just enough high frequency peaks to give it “sparkle and sheen,” yet not so
much to warrant characterizing it as at all “brash.” It is just about how I
would design a set of headphones if that were my job, and if I had the talent
to do it. I don’t have any such talent, but lucky for all of us – Grado Labs
has!
Listening late at night to some of my favorite CDs I found some talking
points. For example, on a mono CD of Dizzy Gillespie, with one of his
chamber jazz ensembles, titled Sonny Side Up: (Verve, 825 674-2, 1956);
with Dizzy’s trumpet-playing in its prime, Sonny Rollins (beginning to make a
name for himself) along with Sonny Stitt on tenor saxes; plus a rhythm
section of Ray Bryant, piano; his brother Tommy Bryant, bass; and Charlie
Persip, drums; I could hear every damn thing, and everything was nearly as it
sounds on my big rig, only better (clearer, cleaner, no listening room issues).
This CD provides the novelty of listening in mono, and still getting depth, and
non-overpowering bass, non-intrusive cymbals, not-too-percussive piano
details along with the soloists.

Dizzy is most sly with Sonny Rollins soloing on “After Hours” and Dizzy
chiming in from the rear with little affirming phrases, that sometimes sound
like “Eeeyow,” which he achieved by some control mechanism he got from his
embouchure. He was in pitch, on the beat, and he got these ironic
punctuating grace notes from his horn. Diz was not loud, matter of fact he
was soft enough to seem he was vocalizing the point, the equivalent of, “Go
man.” (Sort of like dobro player Corey Harris’s calling “Yeah,” and “Uh-huh,”
and “Ow” to urge Junior Wells on during his vocal, “Ships on the Ocean,”on
their Come On In This House album {Telarc, SACD 63395, 1996}.) I think I
have assumed Dizzy was singing those chops for decades, scatting phrases,
something I’d heard him do in performance. Through the GS-1000 I could
clearly hear, for the first time, he was doing it through his trumpet.
On the David Grisman/Jerry Garcia CD Not For Kids Only (Acoustic Disc, ACD-
8, 1993) there are many acoustic details that are surprising: A “horsefly”
wandering around the soundstage during “There Ain’t No Bugs On Me;” a
surprising septet arrangement of “Teddy Bear’s Picnic” adding a rhythm guitar,
bass, trumpet, clarinet, and trombone to Garcia’s acoustic guitar and
Grisman’s mandolin. But most surprising was Jerry Garcia’s plaintive and
haunting vocal on “When First Unto This Country,” perhaps made more
heartbreaking by our knowledge of his pre-mature death. In any event, his
untrained, gravelly, somewhat nasal voice tells us of how the narrator was
willing to die for the love of a maiden. I find Garcia’s art particularly touching
on this cut, his voice least affected, his phrasing nearly conversational as if he
were talking directly to me. And I can’t remember connecting with this song
quite as unabashedly through any other reproduction system. I attribute it to
the most life-like GS-1000 headphones.

Similarly, I found equally affecting Bryn Terfel’s “Danny Boy” on his CD Bryn
Terfel Sings Favorites (DG, 474 638-2, 2003). This is a full orchestral version
of an Irish music-hall song, a father’s love song to his son gone off to war. If
you have any feeling for that situation, this one will get ya. The recording of
this version of “Danny Boy” showed me something about dynamics.
Through other headphones when the music called for loud, they seemed to go
to as loud as they could go too quickly, and sounded strained. The GS-1000
could take demandingly loud passages in a more relaxed way, play them in
stride without strain, as though they had something in reserve. Similarly, on
that disc the duet between Andrea Bocelli and Bryn Terfel, from Bizet’s The
Pearl Fishers, came through quite loud and clear without any suggestion of
stress or strain. With these ‘phones, Grado has a tiger in his tank.

Another “torture test” is a recording originally marketed by the Harmonia
Mundi label, but which I received owing to my subscription to BBC Music (a
free album with each issue, which I heartily recommend to classical heads as
a way to expand your exposure to various periods and countries), on its own
label. [And for surround-for-music fans, most of the CDs have lots of clean
ambient information which decodes beautifully with ProLogic II or Circle
Surround...Ed.] It is Bach, JS; Four Violin Sonatas and Toccata and Fugue,
BWV 565 (BBC Music; Vol 8, No 5; 1999). I think it is still available through
the magazine. If you’re interested, do a Google. The most fascinating thing
about this album is the Toccata and Fugue, written for organ, here
transcribed for solo violin. In the 7 min. 28 sec. performance the violin is has
to play from its highest register to its lowest, from ppp to fff. The piece
demands all sorts of pyrotechnics that produce the inevitable sounds of
fingering and bowing. Through the Grado GS-1000 ‘phones there were no
unintended violin screeches, and while there were fingering and bowing
sounds, they were appropriately down in the mix. So, again, the sound of
solo violin seemed spot-on for me, as natural as sitting in a small
performance hall at Baltimore’s Peabody Conservatory last week when some
advanced students performed Messiaen’s Quartet For The End Of Time, and I
managed a seat in the fourth row.

Also, I’d like to tout you onto the Schubert’s String Quintet D 956 (Praga
Digitals; PRD/DSD 250 191; 2003), sometimes simply called Schubert’s “Cello
Quintet,” also distributed by Harmonia Mundi. It is awesome! This is
generally considered a masterwork and a pillar of the chamber music
repertoire. I had little awareness of just how great it was before I heard it
through the Grado GS-1000 ‘phones. There are things that (in the past) you
wouldn’t “get” if you were not at a live performance, watching and listening
intently. For example, in the first movement there are passages where the
two celli are playing in unison (to generate heft, and darkness of tone), other
times when they were an octave, or a third, or a fifth, or some strange
interval apart (accenting progressive harmonics). If you have two instruments
playing the same note an octave apart, it is hard to discriminate that through
recordings. It is considerably easier if it is a third or a fifth separating them
because the overtones differ. They say you can hear things through ‘phones
you can’t quite make out with a free-standing system, even in a dedicated
room, because of standing waves, and echoes, and decay times that mask
tones. So trust me when I say there are things going on in this music that
are so subtle you have to have a primo reproduction chain to catch. The
Grado GS-1000 is a good candidate for the transducer in a prime system.
On John Pizzarelli’s recent album, Dear Mr. Sinatra, (Telarc, SACD-63638,
2006), on the cut “Witchcraft,” The Clayton-Hamilton Jazz Orchestra, a
dynamite band just now gathering a following and being used on other
recording dates, comes in with an earth-shattering blast. This is actually a
chord, rising from near silence – held hardly a second – then allowed to decay
to near silence, before resuming the song. Reminiscent of Haydn’s “Surprise
Symphony,” where Papa used a bass drum shot to wake the dozing audience
he had lulled to sleep, this nuclear blast gets our attention, no shit, and
achieves arranger Don Sebesky’s purpose. It is also a minor miracle of the
advancing recording technique. Each and every instrument in the seventeen
piece band is doing something, within this “Surprise,” and we hear each
separated out. Subsequently, we follow all the parts for the rest of the song
as the orchestra rises and falls at strategic moments. Another, similar miracle
is on the cut “If I Had You,” where the ensemble consists of five clarinets,
piano, and voice. The clarinets are thrown into some very interesting chords,
and through the Grado GS-1000 we can here all the subtleties of a choir of
nearly identical B-flat clarinets and one bass clarinet playing a rather
ingenious accompaniment to Pizzarelli’s thoughtful vocal. Not that other
headphones can’t recover the things I’ve listed in the previous paragraphs,
but the Grados make it easier to sort things out. Definitely.

So, to sum up: the new Grado ‘phones can capture micro-details down in the
mix and retrieve them in proportion. They can portray human singing in a
natural way that gets closer to the goal of capturing the musician “in the
room” and helps solder the emotional connection between artist and audience
that makes this enterprise so rewarding. They have very good dynamic range
and an ability to handle very loud passages without sounding strained. They
are voiced such that they are never brash nor harsh yet they retrieve fretting
and bowing sounds without putting them up too far in the mix. They resolve
so well they capture harmonically related sounds without blurring them
together into a chord. And (succeeding at all of the above, it follows) they
capture spatial relations as well as any ‘phones I’ve heard.. These
headphones are for the minority who want to hear everything that’s on a CD,
especially for recording engineers, musicians, reviewers, music students, and
for those audiophiles who would own the very best.

One drawback these Grados might have is, they are so good they will
reproduce whatever is on the software. If you want to hear delicacy, detail,
low level performance subtleties, you will need a front end (a CD/SACD player
and a ‘phones amp) good enough to extract everything on the software and
pass it on to the ‘phones. I think people with less than first rate systems will
feel let down. I don’t often feel that way. For example, Lowthers (that lately
I’ve been fooling around with) tend to make lesser amps (my $29 Sonic
Impact 5w/ch amp) sound better than most other speakers do. Lowthers still
play their best with the high-grade equipment (like the de Havilland Ios
amp), but they won’t embarrass anyone who wants to play them through a
twenty-year-old receiver. Likely they will be better than what preceded
them. The opposite is true of the Grado GS-1000s. They are a bit ruthless,
reproducing whatever is on the software, so whatever level of excellence
describes your front end, that’s what you’ll get out. They won’t make chicken
poop into chicken salad. They will expose it for what it is. But if you really
want to hear, say, an opera late at night, in private, and you have a good
CD/SACD player, like the Marantz SA 1151, you’ll have to go to Salzburg or
Vienna to top what you’ll get (great sound, emotional connection) from your
Grado GS-1000s. But a top-flight Walk-around CD player, through the Grado
RA-1 battery powered ‘phones amp, will give you a surprisingly good
approximation through the GS-1000s.

As anyone who gets mail knows, we are approaching the Christmas season.
The catalogues swell my mail box to bursting even as I click and clack away.
Of course it would be foolish to suggest a $1000 item as a present, except for
you deep pockets guys out there. But, how can the rest of us maneuver our
way into it. I’d suggest, for those who can spend such sums without
squirming, buy a pair for yourself and give your formerly held “flagship”
headphones to your son, or son-in-law, or wife (heh-heh), all gift wrapped,
with new foam pads. You’ll score heavy “good guy” points. No one will mind if
you snuggle into your favorite chair to listen to your new GS-1000s. Failing
that, buy your wife one of those extravagant gifts she’s been hinting about,
and strongly suggest she buy you, in return, a set of Grado’s latest
masterworks. If she collects jewelry, kitchen gear, cashmere sweaters,
anything, she’ll understand. If you are like some of us, retirees living on a
fixed income, you’ll have to wait until Grado allows some of his latest
production tricks to trickle down to his less expensive models. And if you
must, as I must, control my lust for ownership, well our human wisdom is
enriched by the understanding of Envy. I think each of us can be better
people for having a touch of Envy now and then ... in small doses ... ‘cuz it’s
still a deadly Sin. But we’ll understand others a bit better for having
experienced it ourselves. Been there, done that.

To recapitulate, the Grado GS-1000 headphones do everything good
headphones do, and then some. They are so good they deserve some
eponym, like “The Great” Grado 1K’s. That is not to say they revolutionize
the field: that wouldn’t be John Grado’s way. They incrementally raise the
bar, solving some nasty problems that have deviled designers for some time
now. Whereas the best of previous headphones were either too bold and
brash, or too painfully polite, these ‘phones can be both in turn if that’s what
the recording engineers deliver. The Great Grados do not make brash
recordings sound polite, nor polite recordings sound brash. Have I mentioned
that they are the first to give you what is on the software. And they are
comfortable. They are a nominee for “Max Dudious’s Product of the Year,
2006.” Good job, everyone at Grado Labs. And when you rush out to buy a
pair, grab your old lady and do a stately Pomp & Circumstance up to the
counter, modestly slide him your Platinum Card, and remember to tell the
guy, “Max Dudious sent me.”

-- Max Dudious