So, I recently bought these headphones from an SNA member:

 

 

 

 

 

and I've been quite happy with them. A bit of googling suggests they are a version of the Grado SR325 sold by a store in Melbourne called 'Audiophile', back in the mid 2000s. There's some conjecture as to how they differ from the Grado offering, but nothing concrete. It's all forum gossip. 

 

Curious about what made them different, and why they existed at all, I emailed Grado to see if they knew anything. They replied thusly:

 

 

This, as they say, only raises further questions. Why did Audiophile mod these? What did they modify other than the aesthetics? Did Grado know or care? Was this a distribution rights thing? How long did this go on and how many are there in the wild?

 

If anyone bought one of these back in the day, or if you worked at Audiophile or can put me in touch with someone who did, please let me know!

Edited August 21, 20223 yr by twofires

Audiophile  were for many years the Grado importers. When that  agency went to another company, Audiophile  ended up with a pile  of  Grado stock ( and many service spare parts). To   clear the redundant components re-branding occurred and while the Amber name was used the reality is that  the headphones are Grado derivatives.

I assume the same story applies to the Amber Grado cartridge I bought off Nik at Audiophile about '05. I had no doubt that the cartridge was genuine and was fine with the rebadge. Still going strong. Thanks @VanArn

2 hours ago, VanArn said:

Audiophile  were for many years the Grado importers. When that  agency went to another company, Audiophile  ended up with a pile  of  Grado stock ( and many service spare parts). To   clear the redundant components re-branding occurred and while the Amber name was used the reality is that  the headphones are Grado derivatives.

 

That's fascinating, although it also makes perfect sense. Forgive my ignorance, but we're you involved in the store personally in some respect, or do you just have a really good memory for these things?

 

Thanks for the info all the same!

Edited August 21, 20223 yr by twofires

1 hour ago, ThirdDrawerDown said:

I assume the same story applies to the Amber Grado cartridge I bought off Nik at Audiophile about '05. I had no doubt that the cartridge was genuine and was fine with the rebadge. Still going strong. Thanks @VanArn

 

Did you happen to have a photo of the cart? I'm curious to see the other rebranded things so I can recognise them if they ever come up. 

And I suppose a follow up question is: were they complete headphones that were modified, or headphones built from spare parts, or a mixture of both? 

The Amber branding was consistent across all product lines - amps, headphones, cables, speakers, whatever. Included logo, font style, etc. The main messages are that the gear was seriously good, and not to confuse Audiophile's Amber brand with another brand "Amber Technology" that has entered the audio market recently (where recently is "sometime after 2015 or so").

 

If you go 'way back to the 1970s there was an Amber brand in the USA. Nik bought that brand and relocated it to Melbourne. The full story is in the late Nude's posting on this Stereonet thread:

 

 

Another link which fills in the picture a little. It mentions a Charlottesville connection; it may not be coincidence that for many years Audiophile was Australia's agent for Cary audio, based in Charlottesville.

https://www.audiocircle.com/index.php?topic=20060.0

 

A few years ago Audiophile relocated to a factory unit in North Heidelberg when a proposed motorway tunnel threatened the sonic viability of the Brunswick St store. The web-only Audiophile operation can be found at this archive.org address. It was disposing of stock, as the business was shuttering pre-pandemic, it may have have closed down fully now.  They are/were on ebay. I see https://www.audiophile.com/ now gives a 403 error.

 

https://web.archive.org/web/20211216094833/https://www.audiophile.com/

 

The link is to archive.org, so you can click on earlier dates to see the products and their branding elements at that time, eg go to 2008 and look for headphones.

1 hour ago, ThirdDrawerDown said:

The Amber branding was consistent across all product lines - amps, headphones, cables, speakers, whatever. Included logo, font style, etc. The main messages are that the gear was seriously good, and not to confuse Audiophile's Amber brand with another brand "Amber Technology" that has entered the audio market recently (where recently is "sometime after 2015 or so").

 

If you go 'way back to the 1970s there was an Amber brand in the USA. Nik bought that brand and relocated it to Melbourne. The full story is in the late Nude's posting on this Stereonet thread:

 

 

Another link which fills in the picture a little. It mentions a Charlottesville connection; it may not be coincidence that for many years Audiophile was Australia's agent for Cary audio, based in Charlottesville.

https://www.audiocircle.com/index.php?topic=20060.0

 

A few years ago Audiophile relocated to a factory unit in North Heidelberg when a proposed motorway tunnel threatened the sonic viability of the Brunswick St store. The web-only Audiophile operation can be found at this archive.org address. It was disposing of stock, as the business was shuttering pre-pandemic, it may have have closed down fully now.  They are/were on ebay. I see https://www.audiophile.com/ now gives a 403 error.

 

https://web.archive.org/web/20211216094833/https://www.audiophile.com/

 

The link is to archive.org, so you can click on earlier dates to see the products and their branding elements at that time, eg go to 2008 and look for headphones.

 

Awesome. Thanks for all of that! 

1 hour ago, ThirdDrawerDown said:

. It was disposing of stock, as the business was shuttering pre-pandemic, it may have have closed down fully now

Nik passed away around that time too

 

 

 

@sir sanders zingmore I didn't want to mention it, because it wasn't within the OP's line of enquiry. It's a loss I feel keenly even now; others were much closer to Nik and I hope they are travelling OK. Still miss him.

I'm very sorry to hear it. My condolences to those of you who knew him. Sounds like a memorable guy. 

Sorry for resurrecting this topic again, but I've been listening to (and enjoying) these headphones a fair bit lately. Consequently, I've been doing a bit more research, and some things don't quite add up.

 

To recap, the person on the other end of the Grado e-mails says these headphones are not made by them. The consensus reached here was that the Audiophile proprietor and Amber brand owner Nik took Grado parts and rebadged them after losing Grado distribution rights. I was happy with that explanation, but, there's some contradictory info out there. Points 1-3 below are sort of 'yeah, maybe', but 4-6 really muddy the waters.

 

1. The drivers in the headphones are the very old 'pink cheesecloth' variety, that, based on my research, typically indicate 90s manufacture.
2. The foam in the box is the old 'blue foam' that also only appeared in very early Grado packaging. This foam is typically what the 'pink driver' Grado units were packaged in, to the point that I wonder if this foam's tendency to mould isn't what causes the pink shade on the cheesecloth filters.
3. Rebranding of the Grado SR325 (the most similar model) would have involved machining the Grado decals off the cups (and the design doesn't look like what would result from that process). Machining new cups from scratch also doesn't make sense - how many spare parts would Audiophile need to have had to make that economical? 
4. Utilising the wayback machine, you can see that a headphone called the Amber Pro was listed on the Audiophile website as early as 1999, which is as far back as records go. https://web.archive.org/web/19990822150203/http://www.audiophile.com.au/start_accessories.htm
5. The headphone exists on the website through until 2005, complete with picture: https://web.archive.org/web/20050619020044/http://www.audiophile.com.au/prdcts_amber.html
6. In this archived sale thread from 2010, a fella named 'Nude', who, from what I gather, was a mate of Nik's, says "these were made by Grado to Amber's specification". 

 

Now, I'm not sure when Audiophile lost Grado distribution, but it seems they held it long past 2005. There's a Found Sound sale page for a pair that sold a couple of years ago ( https://foundsound.com.au/products/531 ) that refers to them as a Grado Mod, however this was after this thread was last active, so I wouldn't be surprised if they sourced that information from here.

 

While it's possible that the old drivers and old foam insert sat around in a Grado parts box until after Audiophile lost Grado, an alternative explanation that presents itself is;

• Audiophile distributes Grado in the 90s.
• At some point they discuss a signature run with Grado and order a minimum quantity for sale under the Amber brand, priced at $599. The headphone has Grado logos on the cable and yoke, but the headphone cups are unbranded. The box features Grado specs identical to the SR325, but is otherwise blank. Audiophile add a little Amber sticker button to the headphones and box once landed in Aus (much cheaper than custom engraving or embossing). 
• Stock sells slowly until exhausted in 2005.
• Later on, Audiophile loses Grado distribution rights, and rebrands and sells some products and parts under the Amber name, however the headphones actually predate this.
• In 2013, Grado modernises. Over time, any record or memory of having worked on a one-off lot of custom headphones for a former distributor on the other side of the world is simply lost.
• In 2022, Grado tell the Australian with the weird headphones that they don't recognise them.

 

The shape and design and sound of these headphones is interesting, bearing all this in mind. It is priced above an SR325 but below something like a PS500, and while the cup inner is plastic like the SR325 (and not wood like the PS500), the styling and sound is more in the PS500 direction (fuller, less agressive, but not muddy).

 

Again, I really enjoy them, so I'm trying to figure out what I can. If you see a pair come up for sale, I think they're worth a shot.

Edited May 2, 2025May 2 by Cope

Actually, it seems like back in 1999, Audiophile had a big gap in the Grado price range:

 

https://web.archive.org/web/19990822150203/http://www.audiophile.com.au/start_accessories.htm

 

Jumping from the SR125 at AUD$449 to the then recently introduced RS2 at AUD$999. This makes me wonder if the SR325 was, at the time, too expensive to work in the Australian market, and so the Amber Pros were developed as a 'no frills' variant to get the price down to something Audiophile could work with. That certainly seems in line with my experience of small business retail sales. It also explains why Grado might not acknowledge them as a Grado product - they don't meet the standard for a Grado, aesthetically, so they can't be sold as Grado.

 

It's worth noting that the Amber Pro doesn't survive much past the introduction of the SR325i in 2003. By then Audiophile had old stock SR325 at an RRP of $699, and by 2007 they had SR325i for a much more reasonable $439 (the first 'i' series to hit their store).

 

If that's the case, the Amber Pro is basically a less pretty SR325, which seems to sound quite a bit different to modern Grado. 

Edited May 2, 2025May 2 by Cope

Taking all the information in this thread at face value, it beggars belief to me that Audiophile could have sold what appear to be Grado knock-offs without Grado's approval or involvement, otherwise one could have expected the long arm of the American legal system to reach out in the form of some kind of copyright claim or action.  To this extent, therefore, Grado's email appears quite disingenuous.

 

Quite a few pieces of rebranded equipment have appeared for sale on SNA over the years, most notably preamps largely based on a Cary design.

 

This does make me wonder why companies like Grado or Cary would allow a small Australian outfit like Audiophile to effectively rebrand their products, especially when it was still selling them at the same time.

 

A thread from long ago, started by me, may be of interest:

 

 

1 hour ago, Bronal said:

Taking all the information in this thread at face value, it beggars belief to me that Audiophile could have sold what appear to be Grado knock-offs without Grado's approval or involvement, otherwise one could have expected the long arm of the American legal system to reach out in the form of some kind of copyright claim or action.  To this extent, therefore, Grado's email appears quite disingenuous.

 

Quite a few pieces of rebranded equipment have appeared for sale on SNA over the years, most notably preamps largely based on a Cary design.

 

This does make me wonder why companies like Grado or Cary would allow a small Australian outfit like Audiophile to effectively rebrand their products, especially when it was still selling them at the same time.

 

A thread from long ago, started by me, may be of interest:

 

 

 

Interesting. I think I read over this thread a few years back, but it makes more sense now. @Nude saying "I worked with Nik in the 80s and early 90s" certainly gives credence to his version of events.

 

As for Grado, Cary etc., while that thread suggests Audiophile had more of a symbiotic relationship with Cary, I can't see Grado really needing anything from anyone by the 90s, as they were well established for many decades by that point. The thread you linked does mention custom Amber cable/wire, and that mirrors something mentioned in the text on the Audiophile website in 99 about 'unique' cabling on the Amber Pro headphones. So, I dunno, maybe Nik had strong feelings about cables and insisted on Grado making the Amber Pro with Amber wire inside the Grado. But the evidence against that is in black and white on the label inside the Amber Pro box. The text seems to be exactly the spec for the SR325, and it also states "Designed and Manufactured in the USA".

 

This all leads me to believe this Amber Pro headphone is a white label version of the SR325 gold letter, seen here: https://www.head-fi.org/threads/vintage-black-grado-sr325-gold-lettering-review-vs-vintage-sr125-rs1.549243/, as the box dimensions, cup shape, and driver configuration seem close to identical.

 

While I'm sure it was a little more wild west in the 90s, I imagine a company might occasionally cast an eye over a distributor's website. Having an unsanctioned knockoff in plain sight would probably be a bit too cute, even for a guy known for having a 'take it or leave it' attitude. I agree that it had to be an above board deal. Having said that, I'm sure an unknown white label deal from the distant past doesn't reflect too well on a brand trying to develop a Levis-esque identity in the modern era of 'your name here' Ali Express product. So while it's annoying that I can't seem to get a straight answer, I can see why that might be the case.

 

 

Edited May 2, 2025May 2 by Cope