Grado SR60x
The cheapest way into the Grado house sound, and it measures exactly like the thing people either love or bounce off. Measured here on our own bench.
Our take
This is a forward headphone and the graph says so: a large lift through the upper midrange peaking near 2 kHz, and very little weight underneath it. Some of that missing bass is the headphone and some is physics — an open, on-ear pad seals against nothing, on a measurement fixture or on your head, so read the low end as directional. What is not in doubt is the midrange emphasis, which is what makes guitars and voices leap forward and what makes some people reach for the volume and others reach for the box.
Measured by Warren Labs on a miniDSP EARS Pro. The headphone is seated deliberately for the best fit — the way someone who cares about sound adjusts a headphone before they settle in to listen — rather than placed at random, and the published curve is a single real seating chosen by an objective rule, never a blend. Both channels are measured and stored separately; the line drawn here is their average. Raw response, normalized to 0 dB at 1 kHz. An EARS Pro is not an industry reference coupler such as a GRAS 45CA, so read this as a house reference: repeatable against our other EARS Pro measurements, not directly comparable to another lab. Seating repeatability on this bench is not characterized yet, so there is no variance figure to give. Do not read fine treble detail as settled.How we measure →
Common questions
Straight answers — the same ones our measurements support.
Why does the SR60x measure so bass-light?
Two reasons that compound. It is open and on-ear, so there is no seal to support low frequencies — that part is real and you hear it. On top of that, any fixture under-reads an unsealed headphone in the bass, so the measured number is more pessimistic than your ears will be. Directional, not exact.
Does the Grado SR60x need an amp?
No. 38 Ω and roughly 100 dB/mW plays loud off anything.
Can EQ fix the bass?
Partly. You can add low end and it will follow, but a driver with no seal has limits — you will run out of headroom before you reach a bass-heavy tuning. Adding a few dB is realistic; rebuilding it as a basshead headphone is not.
If you like the SR60x
Close on the graph, or a deliberate step in one direction.