Okay, this is based on just one night of listening, and during this night I kept switching back to the W5000 because I want to listen to it as well. This is the problem with buying two high end cans at the same time I guess. The previous owner claims to have about 3 hours on the cans, so after last night bring that total to about 5 or 6. I'm not a huge believer in burn-in past the 20 or so hour mark.
On bright recordings, the GS1000 is sibilant. No way around it. Some people say that this is the case with "bad" recordings. Well I don't think say, the Depeche Mode SACDs are bad recordings at all, they are just bright. With the GS1000, Gahan's vocals get all slippery and fly up into the highs, and the result is sibilance. Now I know I've been talking about vinyl a lot lately, but with vinyl this is not so much of an issue, because vinyl simply cannot get as bright as redbook: too much treble and the needle would pop off the record. So I did a lot of listening with vinyl and the GS1000 last night.
But this is not to say the GS-1000 is sibilant with all redbook. Lets talk about bass. I listened to Massive Attack's Mezzanine last night, and was pretty doped up by the bass response. Flowing, pulsing, and very alive sounding, but never once did I really feel the bass was "out of control". And while the highs were certainly bright, they did not approach sibilance. Vocals, both male and female, were smooth, lifelike, and imaged well.
Tangent: One of the biggest differences between my current amps (Melos and Dynahi) and my old amp (PPX3 Slam) is the bass. The Slam really accentuated the bass. To illustrate, I rarely ever listened to the RS-1s with flats with the Slam, because the bass was so prevalent it drowned out any semblance of a soundstage. With bowls the bass was excellent. With the Melos and the RS-1, flats is definitely the way to go. With bowls the sound is a bit tinny and thin. With flats the bass is excellent. I really hate blaming amplification for what sounds like a headphone's inherent flaw, but basically thats what I'm doing here. I think reports of out of control bass with the GS-1000 could be more due to amplification not appropriate to Grados in general. Or it could just be my ears. End Tangent
There was maybe one time on one album when the bass briefly sounded a little hokey and inaccurate, but I can't remember what recording that was.
The much talked about soundstage is nice and kind of neat with a Grado. The midrange is not as recessed as I thought it would be, sometimes I still got a hint of that Grado midrange magic, but not nearly on the level of an RS-1 or HP-2. More listening is required to do a better evaluation.
At least at this point, I do not think the GS-1000 does dynamics well. Earlier I talked about Gahan's vocals getting slippery and flying off into sibilant space. When a sound goes from one spectrum to another, especially when it is leaving the midrange and heads into the highs, it gets confused and sibilant. This could change with "burn-in", but again I'm not a huge burn-in guy.
I found the GS-1000 is not a great straight rock can. It performed well with slower folky type rock (Wilco Sky Blue Sky: in general acoustic instruments have a nice timbre to them) and with more consistent electronic type fare (aforementioned Massive Attack) and with some 80s era type new wavish pop (Talking Heads, New Order). I haven't listened to any jazz yet. With some recordings I could crank up the volume comfortably, but with others the shrillness of the highs was simply too much.
In short, the GS-1000 is a drastically different can then any other Grado I've heard before, which includes the SR60, SR225, SR325i, RS-1, and HP-2. The GS-1000 has some good things going for it. The bagels are ultra-comfortable, there is a rather nice soundstage that I think is unique in the headphone world, acoustic instruments and some vocals sound pleasant, and in my opinion, on my system, the bass is fantastic. Having said those nice things, the shrill and sometimes sibilant highs make me think that the GS-1000 just might be a fundamentally flawed can, which is a sad thing to say about a headphone that approaches a four digit MSRP. A bit more listening time will tell if this is the case.
