Revisiting this thread.
I had the luxury of hearing the grado black 2 in my system on a table I just went through.
I ran the cart over my various test, and listening albums. This is quite an improvement over the original Black, and a decent improvement over the Black -1. I find the soundstage to be a nice mix of the old grado and the X, Z and prestige soundstage. Wide, and deep. Tonal balance is still a bit off, but we're talking about an entry level cart. Which overall, this carts certainly doesn't sound like entry level.
It's very quiet in the grove, handles ticks and pops nearly as well as my upper signature styli. Which means micro-mistracking is almost nil.
bass is still forward, but much better controlled than the Black-1, upper midrange is still recessed, but a good bit less than the Black-1. Retains the grado house sound, but give a much much smoother presentation with nary a cringe level on heavy, high frequency transients. Playing Amon Tobin ISAM, there is some serious low registers recorded. It tracked them well, although did enhance them a touch, but not to the point of bloat. More importantly, during those extremely low, and loud passages, the rest of the music, and just as important the position of the music remained pretty much where it was supposed to be. Something the Prestige series up to now has failed to do (<~~<< to my ears)