Grado Labs, Inc.

I have a confession to make, one that will, I’m sure, seal off the last remaining avenue to my quest for the highest elected office in the land. Back in the 1960’s, I indulged in certain youthful transgressions: I listened to music through headphones.

In those times I never met a crossover I couldn't melt. And when my very last speaker bit the dust, it was a pair of headphones, dynamically modest though they were, that saved the day. Headphones couldn't rattle the kitchen cabinets like a pair of Altec’s Voice of the Theater industrial P.A. horns, but with a few candles and some good wine, who cared? The Beatles, The Stones, and The Moody Blues all managed to make their presence felt.

Cassettes were brand-new in the late ‘60’s; on the road or at home, 8-track was still the tape format of the masses. Mostly though, LP’s ruled the roost, and back then many of the phono cartridges that played them were manufactured by Grado Labs, one of the oldest family-owned companies in the audio industry.

Grado! Rolls right off the tongue, no? Great name for a new shoe everyone’s talking about as in,"Hey! My girlfriend got me a pair of Grados for my birthday." Or a tasty new snack, as in "Sweetheart, get me a beer and a bag of Grados and hand me the remote, will you?"

So this brings us to the real business at hand - Grado’s dedicated headphone amplifier. High-end earphone manufacturers have always been frustrated by the paltry attention paid to the circuitry behind most amplifiers' and receivers' headphone jacks, and with good reason: The biggest amp manufacturers were not headphone manufacturers, so headphone sound quality was never a priority. Lots of components nowadays don’t even include a headphone jack. Users of high-quality headphones often find themselves staring at a $4,000 amplifier with no place to stick them in.

That’s when John Grado realized the dedicated headphone amp was a niche waiting to be filled. Other high-end headphone companies felt the same way, largely because of a world of headphone jacks that simply did not meet their standards. The original Grado Reference Products headphone amps were introduced in 1991 at $795; today the price has fallen to $350. I reviewed its current version, which represents the company’s latest thinking on how best to drive it’s special ’phones.

Setup is simply: Insert two 9-volt batteries, connect the amp inputs to any line source and away you go. You probably don’t want to be wearing your headphones when you turn the RA-1 amp on, though: When it clicks on, it produces a bright, audible pop. John Grado claims a great Sisyhean trade-off was required: Nix the pop, and sonic integrity falls off ever so slightly. Hence, the pop stays.

So, I thought I’d slip on my Grado SR80 headphones($95), plug ’em into the Grado RA-1 amp, and go hunt some bear. I headed right for some big ol' super-dense orchestra music from Erich (the bad boy of turn-of-the-century Vienna) Wolfgang Korngold and, using an all-NAD rig as my baseline, loaded up. I hooked the Grado amp into the "Rec Out" jack of the excellent, no-fuss NAD 317 integrated amp, mated to an NAD 512 CD player, and cued up the opening bars of Korngold’s brilliant, "unperformable" magnum opus, Das Wunder de Halloween. A lush, celestial, chordal theme for full orchestra and harmonium wells up in a progression of shimmering, bi-tonal harmonies that crystallize the opera’s recurring themes of the power of eternal love and resurrection. Phew!

I greedily plugged the SR80s into the Grado RA-1 and began to listen to this fabulous music, planning to hear a few minutes worth and then begin switching between the RA-1 and the NAD. Forty minutes later, I realized I had been savoring this music in a way I never had before. The sound was at once more immediate, clearer, and more refined than I recalled from speaker listening. A quick switch over to the NAD provided my first confirmation of the rightness of dedicated headphone amps. The NAD’s sound was broader, more diffuse, with voices less focus in the midrange and not nearly as clear and airy in the high end. The music heard through the Grado RA-1 amp sounded appreciably better in every way.

Next, on the splendid composer/arranger Maria Schneider’s distinguished, hard swinging, big band jazz orchestra. On the edgy, fear laced "Bombshelter Beast" the first section of the three movement "Scenes from Childhood" suite from her 1996 recording Coming About, Scott Robinson’s gutsy baritone sax projected real heft for such a diminutive speaker system. And Jim Anderson’s uncannily concise mix of his authoritative 10-piece ensemble, complete with brilliantly involved theramin, remained dynamically smooth throughout. Tony Scherr’s creepy, "bug crawling up your leg" deep electric bass lines on "Night Watchman" sent me cranking up the volume, fascinated by its better than life like presence through the Grado SR80 headphones and RA-1 amp.

This kind of music is richly layered, engagingly plotted, and powerfully performed here. On sexier, laid-back cuts like "Love Theme from Spartacus," I found an exquisitely audible midrange tension in Rich Perry’s tenor-sax playing that was not nearly as pulsingly vibrant when heard through the NAD’s jack.

While headphone listening can never approach the bone-crunching deep bass of full-size, high-end speakers with subwoofers or hope to project the high-grade imaging of full-blown systems, the benefits and advantages of the Grado SR80 headphones-with the Grado RA-1 amp doing the driving-were stunning.

Back to Korngold for my final test audition. Korngold, after the strenuous effort of composing opera and large orchestral pieces, would seek a kind of psychic sabbatical in chamber pieces. In the kinetic first movement of his String Quartet No. 1 in A, an extremely demanding piece to perform, Korngold brilliantly juxtaposes a forbidding, relentlessly onrushing, chromatic figure with a poignantly touching love theme in a way that in its sound picture is pure Korngold, at once displaying breathtaking technique and lovely tenderness. Here the Grado RA-1 really came through with flying colors, allowing a terrifically precise dynamic flow, more focused with a far more accurate sense of presence than the NAD.

Overall, with no disrespect to the NAD 317, the all-Grado listening experience with the SR80 headphones and RA-1 dedicated headphone amp was quite a turn-on. With the Grado Reference RA-1 handling the amplification, music was rendered truer, clearer, and more life-like than I had ever imagined was possible. Hats off to John Grado!