- I thought these were a joke, okay?
The Hemp Headphones.
I thought this was gonna be a company
kind of just bandwagoning
on the cache of marijuana culture,
probably a brand I never heard of before
just making some novelty thing
that had no purpose and probably sucked,
and then they showed up
and they were from Grado.
Grado has been around forever.
This is a brand that's been around
since at least CS 1994 when they had the SR60s
which were a $69 headphone
that everyone that was $200
'cause they just sounded awesome.
And then with the SR80s
they were totally put on the map
and that's a headphone that people got
as the first headphone they ever had
that really sounded pretty damn good
and it started their journey as an audiophile.
A lot of people have shared that experience.
So I am pretty excited
to open this box and check these out.
This is a limited edition from Grado.
They do these now.
They have their product line that they try not to reinvent
because they're already pretty good
so to keep making new SKUs
and get renewed interest in the brand
they release limited editions
and that's what these are.
Look at this. There's a little note here.
What does it say on the inside?
Family run for six decades in Brooklyn, New York.
We have a note here that's autographed.
Since 1953, our family's been
hand-building headphones and cartridges,
cartridges are for turntables,
in Brooklyn, New York.
Now I feel like Brooklyn has a lot of chutzpah.
If they were from Cleveland, Ohio,
they probably wouldn't have mentioned
that they built them in Cleveland, Ohio.
They probably just would've said built in America
unless they were Drew Carey or something.
In the box, there's,
I wish I could just open this flat for you guys,
but I can't.
It's my little secret.
This is like the briefcase in "Pulp Fiction".
I get to see what's inside, but you don't,
unless you're looking at the top down camera.
Okay, there's not a lot going on in here.
There's the headphones
and just some foam.
And then a box with some extra paragraphs
that just talk about listening to music too loud,
so we're not gonna pay attention to that.
Here they are.
First thing I noticed,
wow, this is a girthy low gauge cable
terminating in a quarter-inch jack
but fortunately, you know,
if you're a little scared right now, don't worry.
It pops off.
They just give you a free adapter in the box
and you can use your,
well, who am I kidding,
nobody has this anymore either, do they?
Bring your own dongle.
These cables from Grano,
they contain eight conductors within,
so just imagine
eight different copper strands inside here.
The plastic is basic.
It's not like a braided cable or stylized any way.
But it's nice.
Splits off and connects to the earcuffs
which rotate just,
there's really no limit.
The limit is just the tension you get
from twisting off the wire.
That's pretty cool.
You can put them on your shoulders. They can rest there.
You can just grab one like that
if you're Paris Hilton in Ibiza or something.
These ear pads, some people don't like these.
Fortunately, with a lot of their models
you can get replacement ear pads really easily
and they just pop off like that.
And this is the whole reason this exists right here.
When they say these are hemp headphones,
I wasn't really sure what that was gonna mean.
Here's what it means.
This chassis right here is actually a hybrid,
it's a composite of hemp and maple.
You can see on this part of it,
it's just straight up maple.
When they do a limited release like this,
they often differentiate the headphones
just by making a different chassis here
or cup design,
and when they do that
it gives a different sound profile
and then they'll make
a commensurate special EQ to match that
because there's gonna be different responses
from being around this material.
And that's all that's hemp about them,
other than I guess on their product page
where they have all these awesome puns about being blunt
and rolling all these features together,
and joint operations.
It's a fun brand, it's a fun headphone.
The thing with these earcuffs, though,
I'll confess, I opened this box up before,
I listened to these for about an hour,
and I was concerned
that these would be a little uncomfortable,
and for some people they are
because this is really shallow.
Whenever I see an ear cup that's super shallow like this,
I know that my ear is gonna be touching the driver.
For me, particularly in my left ear,
that can become uncomfortable,
but these weren't too bad.
I was also concerned with the headband.
This is a leather headband.
It's pretty thin, there's not a big cushion in there
and I thought that that would be digging into my skull
in short order, but it didn't.
Build quality wise,
these are assembled in Brooklyn by hand,
but I'm really not actually that impressed
with particularly the plastics on this,
I don't really care,
but these things are 420 U.S. dollars,
so I'm allowed to care a little.
Then there's the adjustment.
It goes up and down easily enough,
but the thing is that it's not really consistent
across the length of the pole,
and then there's the consistency between those two polls,
so that's how that one works.
But I go over here, it's just a little different.
Again, it is easier at the beginning,
but it's just they're not
completely consistent between them.
Looks wise, these are sweet,
and I think that's half the reason to buy them.
They do sound good,
and we'll talk about the sound more in a minute,
but I think a lot of people
who are attracted to this headphone
are gonna be people who are kinda minimalist
who have some cash to spend on headphones,
they wanna wear them outside,
you wanna wear them when you're riding on the bus,
but you don't want to wear or listen to Beats,
but you still wanna listen
to something that's kinda minimal.
This is on your ear headphone and they look cool.
They look beautiful.
Lots of their special editions
and even their regular line-up
of headphones look beautiful.
You can tell a lot about a person
who's wearing these headphones,
and I think half the price of admission
is just for the minimal aesthetic
that you're getting here.
Let's talk about the sound now,
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Okay.
Oh yes.
They're just, they're very playful.
They're really nice.
They're smooth,
these are a really flat sound
across the whole frequency range.
They're pretty good.
They definitely have present bass
that sounds distinct,
but it's not really,
I wouldn't say these are for bass heads.
The bass isn't huge, but it's definitely there.
The only time in my listening experience
that I was kinda disappointed
was someone was playing a really high-pitched harmonica
and that just super high wheezing
kind of made me wince.
It wasn't at the point where I had
to turn it down or anything,
but I was on the brink there.
So look out for the highs.
But overall, these do sound great.
One thing that's surprising
is that these headphones are kinda rare
in that they're open backed,
but they don't leak a lot of sound.
I asked Alex, who sits near my desk,
whether he could hear them
when I was listening at a volume
that I would say is louder
than I would normally listen to.
He could not hear it
so he got up from his desk
and walked pretty close to me.
We had masks on.
He never was able to hear my music out of these,
which is pretty crazy.
I would definitely recommend wearing these in public.
I wouldn't wear them to the gym, though.
One other thing about the build
is the caliper pressure.
The force going this way to keep them on my head
is for my size head very comfortable.
They're not too tight, they're not too loose,
but they are a bit loose.
I just did my hair so I don't really wanna headbang,
but if I did, they're gonna fall off.
They're not on there that tight.
They're easy to wear glasses with.
My glasses went right on top.
I didn't have to tilt them at an extreme angle
or anything like that.
One thing I wonder about, though,
is there used to be a problem
that a lot of Grados suffered from
where people's hair would get stuck inside there
and I guess this is related
to the fact that they're open back,
but your hair would go in there
and you'd notice because it would actually
start to affect the sound.
If you just google grattle, G-R-A-T-T-L-E,
you'll see lots of examples of this,
and there's actually a bunch of forum posts
where people are describing how to fix this problem,
which is you actually take one of these off
and then use your mouth to suck on the driver
in a circular motion going around
and you can actually suck the hair out
and get a mouthful of hair.
It's not pleasant, but it works.
And don't put your whole mouth around this
like a bong, okay?
I know it's the Hemp Headphone
but just maybe use a straw or something, okay?
The drivers are matched.
That means that they do testing
to make sure that these sound equal to each other.
And they do matching on their higher-end stuff like these
for 0.05 decibels of difference between them.
Now we don't know
if they test that on one frequency
or a small frequency range
or the whole frequency range.
Most companies don't do the whole range,
so, I mean, it's something
but it could be one of those wishy-washy specs.
Who knows?
But they do sound great anyway, so who cares?
420 bucks. That's a lot.
But they're great headphones if you're a collector.
If you like cannabis culture
and you are an audiophile,
and you got money in your pocket,
or maybe your birthday's coming up,
these are a great headphone to get.
You can see they have kind of a laser etched
branding that says Grado.
It actually has a little cannabis leaf there
that says Hemp underneath it.
Pretty cool.
When you're buying these things, you can see on their site
that they also have offerings for stands
that cost between 150 and 175 U.S. dollars.
Frustratingly, there is no picture of these stands,
and another option to have the cable terminate
in XLR for an extra $175.
Holy (beep).
If you do get that option,
it's not like this is swapped out for XLR,
it sounds like by the little description
that it's actually a Y
higher up in the cable that splits off
and then it has actually XLR male and female
and so you'll be able to use
the phone input or the XLR, your choice,
but, damn, that's a lot of money for that.
I like these headphones, they're cool.
I don't have enough money to buy these, though.
So thanks for watching ShortCircuit today.
If you liked this video, give us a thumbs up,
hit subscribe for all the kinda,
I was gonna say zany and wacky,
I almost said Zachy.
Maybe I'm just high.