Grado’s relationship with wood is as unequivocal, if not as famous, as Lego’s with plastic. The Brooklyn-based, family-owned brand was only a year into hand-building its first headphones when, as the story goes, John Grado (son of the company’s founder, Joseph) woke up one night with the idea of creating a wooden pair and immediately went downstairs to start carving out what would become the RS1.
That inspired further Grado wood creations in the mid-’90s, and today just under half of Grado’s models in its wired open back headphone line-up are aestheticlly defined by those familiar circular wooden earcups.
Grado has always been fond of the warm tonal character that wood brings, and that proclivity hasn’t served the company half bad
