Can i do better for $700 than Grado RS-1?

Thank You.
The problem is that i need a battery operated amp for porable use on the go.I intend on using it while commuting,travelling or just sitting in the park.

Newmanoc,

From my experience you are right on. It would be more reasonable to get a $300 650. It would allow some money for a cable upgrade also which would help give some more detail to the Senns. I use my Senn 600s with ASL MGhead (black plate tubes), and it has very good synergy. The RA-1 is a must for the RS-1.

But given that the 650 is so low in price compared to the RS-1 and a lot of people still will pay the money to move up to the RS-1, I think it's worth a listen at the very least. Whether you like the Grado house sound is a personal thing, which is why it's good to listen if you can. When I was shopping, I couldn't live without the more accurate Senns, and I couldn't live without the musical, toe tapping, Grados, so I bought them both and the appropriate amps for each and listen about 50/50, so I'm really a fense sitter, but if I had to give one up it would be the Senns.

Overhang,

How about looking into a Shure e4 and a portable amp from headroom? It would be easy to stick the whole setup in your pocket, and the sound is very good - on par with the headphones mentioned - minus the bigger soundstage.

Head over to Head-Fi.com for more info but the general consensus there is that

A large ammount of People listening to Rock/Blues/Jazz enjoy the Grado sound and the RS1 is the best they have

A large ammount of people listening to Classical/Jazz enjoy The Senn sound and HD650 is the way to go.

These are generalizations (you may prefer one sound to the other) but represent the jist of how many people feel. If you get Grado's you will want some upgrades (pads and such) probably.

Also a note on your ipod with lossless ...your battery life is going to suck ...instead of the ipod seeking and buffering 5MB songs it will be constanly accessing the disk (since your files will be ~50MB a song in lossless). This means the drive is always turning/wearing and the battery will get sucked down real quick.

Given the limitation of the ipod's internal dac/output and that this is a portable system I would say you could probably get away with 256/320 compression if you want to use the ipod.

The nano is all solid state and will actually get better batter liffe with lossless but you can only fit about 10 lossless albums