Brendan & Tiffany Sullivan

Well, after a good long service life (for daily use), my Sennheiser PX100′s have developed a bad connection somewhere in the signal cables. Makes me very sad, as for the price, I’ve never had a set of headphones that combined so much quality, comfort, and portability in one package. I use/used them almost exclusively over the “in-ear” type headphones due to the comfort; Also, a decent set of ear-buds costs more than I’m willing to spend on set of ‘phones to which the kinds of abuse portable headphones are subjected.

Thus, with my usual flurry of research, I took a few days of reading reviews and such and decided I wanted either a pair of Grado SR60i’s, or I’d bump up my budget a bit and get a set of Sennheiser HD555. I’ve listened to a few Sennheiser ‘phones at Guitar Center, Best Buy, etc and none of the mid-priced offerings there impressed me. Not bad headphones, just not impressive. So I focused my search on trying to find a set of Grados to listen to, for as much as I’d read/heard about them, I’ve never actually been able to listen to a pair. Grado dealers are not very common as they are a small company that does not produce at the quantities needed to sell through a major chain like Best Buy or similar.

Coincidentally, I found a Grado dealer here in Knoxville the next morning. One of our hosting clients at work called the other day and was asking about some billing issues. Turns out he owned a small audio shop in Knoxville I didn’t know about called Statement Media. I poked around on his site a bit and realized he carried some pretty high end stuff: JL Audio, McIntosh, Paradigm, B&W, Denon, etc. I called back and asked if they were a Grado dealer and they said yes! “Do you have a pair of SR60i’s in stock I could listen to?”.. “Yes” again! Wow, lucky day.

I almost immediately locked up the office and took off to find their shop tucked away next to PF Changs. I’d driven past this gold-mine of audio equipment for almost 4 years and never knew they were there. (Cue Tiff’s fear for our bank account). Walked in with a bunch of music on my Droid and stood around for maybe 30 minutes listening to the SR60′s on that, and was immediately hooked on the headphones, and appalled at the quality of my music collection. There’s been an argument for years on the sound quality difference between ‘lossy’ (mp3) and ‘lossless’ (FLAC and WAV) digital audio file formats. Up til now, I was a firm believer that the LAME encoder on the –insane preset was more than enough quality for even semi-critical listening. That is, until I listened to those mp3′s on the Grados.

The SR60i’s are incredibly accurate and detailed headphones for the price. It absolutely blew me away how much noise and nastiness was present in the believed-to-be-quality mp3′s on my Droid. Switched to some FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) music I had. Holy crap these headphones are amazing. There really are not words. If you appreciate music even in the slightest and want to spend a moderate amount of money on a set of headphones that will really bring out all of the subtlety the recordings you listen to have to offer, you absolutely MUST at least listen to a set of Grados. For the price, I really do not see how these things are not the most popular headphone in the world. They are slightly lacking in bass output compared to my PX100′s, but they make up for it in very, very clean output even at extremely high levels and just powered off of my Droid or PC.

I’ll update in the future with “real” pics, but for now, here’s what they look like…

Grado SR60i