top-quark.blog
Grado SR-60
Thu, 10/19/2006, 20:47Being on campus for 14 hours a day is not particularly fun. Lately, a large portion of that time's been spent with a pair of cheapie ipod-style earbuds stuck in my head. For various reasons, mostly my irrational disinclination for going deaf, I've decided to stop using earbuds. My replacement led me back to a set of headphones I'd had once, and really enjoyed - the Grado SR60.
Some very basic research on the net provides a treasure trove of reviews about the SR60. It's the darling of value-oriented sound enthusiasts, and a common infection vector for audiophilia. I won't really go into a huge analysis of my experiences: after about 48 hours of moderately loud break-in, they sounded excellent. My only complaints are that bass is a little weak, the upper end is a little lively ("bright"), and that there's not a lot of sound isolation, for either the listener or the public. These are expected, if one reads the reviews.
A pair of airline socks valiantly gave their lives to the cause of better sound.
Their sacrifice was certainly not made in vain; the socks improve every shortcoming of these headphones. Bass response is (imo, greatly) improved, with only a trace of muddiness. I think this very slight muddiness might be due to the choice of material; a less "fuzzy" sock might have crisper response. Also, rolling them tighter would probably be an improvement (I'd do it, but then I'd need to resew the stitches holding the "rolls" together). Sound isolation is also much improved over my original pair of "quarter-modded" (i.e., quarter-size hole removed) foam pads. The last major improvement is to comfort; I don't find the stock "comfy" pads to be as offensive as some do, but my last pair of decent headphones had earpads surrounding the entirety of the ear (circumaural), versus the "on ear" (supra-aural) design of the original foam pads on the SR60. Tradition won out, and I find that these new pads are much more comfortable than the stock supra-aurals.
More mods may be coming; I'm pretty sure I'm going to rewire the headphones with cable that's thinner. At 3/16 of an inch, the main cord on these is pretty hefty; enigmatically, the "branches" coming off the y-connector feel cheap and thin.
When I get around to opening up the headphones for recabling, chances are good that I'll be doing a couple other mods. Offhand, I'm thinking about adding jacks to the headphones, and plugs to the cable, so that I won't kill my phones if I stand up with my cable underfoot. I'm also thinking about making the wire connection to just one side, and running the wire up through the headband for the other side. Some audiophile nuts I talked with tried to convince me that this would degrade sound quality, on account of the signals being out of phase, due to the small amount of extra cable run.
Sitting down with my calculator, though, I figured a worst-case scenario of about 2e-4 radians offset. That's 0.0002 radians. If there's nothing else you should learn from this short excursion into the world of higher audio mania, it's that the term "audiophile" is a synonym for "sucker".
With profuse apologies to toshi, whose photographic obsession with desaturation has "colored" me. Ha ha.