225 Alive!

My experience so far with Grado Labs has been a bit of an adventure: I started off with a "reasonably priced" set of 80s, which I took home and which lost sound to the left channel intermittently, not a good thing when you've just spent $100 on a pair of headphones and are expecting a decent return on your investment.

Anyhow, I sent those back to the store and, instead of waiting for them or Grado to fix them and send them back, I opted to pay the extra $50 for the 125s. As soon as I got them home, I was, as the trashy rap song goes, "like 'whoa.'" The difference between the 80s and the 125s were intriguing: the bass was fatter with bassy music (desireable, to me) and the high- and mid-range seemed a little more distinguishable and "present."

The sonic difference was enough to spur a phone call to the hi-fi shop I bought them from inquiring about the 225s, at an additional $50 more. I figured what I got from the 125s for an extra $50 would be worth another $50 if I could get a similar additional return from the 225s.

I exchanged them and took home my new 225s, about which I had a good feeling in my gut. I put them on and the first thing about them I noticed to their credit is that compared to the 125s, the bass was *far* more "sorted out" (for lack of a better term), meaning it was just as large and in charge as the 125s, but far more discreet in and of itself: it did not "interfere" with the mid- and high-range nearly as much as the 125s, a complaint I had with the 125s.

The next thing I noticed, to these cans' DIScredit, was the "scalding shower" aural effect of a totally unrelaxed, way-too-pronounced upper-high range. Man, it was awfully uncomfortable, even when listening to some of my favorite, regular recordings which on speakers do not have any of that upper-range, bright wash.

Having heard online (thanks to Epinions and the Headwize.com forums) that Grado cans need a while to relax and gain more richness and clarity after a "burn-in" period, I eagerly did just that. One girl on headwize.com said that her little brother had been listening to some white-noisy metal on her pair and after that she noticed that the sound was much more relaxed and beautiful. Not having a white noise tone disc, I just threw on some Rob Zombie on repeat all day, followed by a day of thump-thump synth techno and a day or two of various other discs.

I started noticing a difference gradually. They became more and more pleasing. I am a big Boy George & Culture Club fan, and listening to the original Culture Club albums, I started hearing nuances I hadn't before, really rediscovering the magic. One night I had such a religious listening experience that I felt, then and there, that my $200 purchase had been quite justified just in that night. These are the magic moments that make high-quality components what they are, I suppose.

Personally, if you are looking for video game headphones, don't get these because they will be awfully unkind to compressed digital sounds. Likewise, you *will* hear all of the anomalies present in any and all mp3s and ATRAC (minidisc) recordings. High-pitched overtones, garbled ground-floor hiss, etc. It's actually kind of fun picking these things out!

In the end, if $300 for the 325s is a bit of a stretch for you, and you can pay or just barely make the $200 mark for a pair of cans, by all means get these. Of course, heed the usual warnings, like if you need seclusion and don't want sound bleed, don't get these, etc. Otherwise, dive in, give them some time to burn in by leaving them hooked up and playing all day for a few days and you will end up with one killer pair of cans.