This is reassuring to hear. I'll have to start advancing all my roasts to this point and see what I like better.
I haven't been able to really correlate my roasts to the pictorals of roast level like found on Sweet Marias. My roasts don't seem to match alot of what I'm seeing there. I can't really tell if I'm at City, city+, full city, etc.
Basically, I get a nice brown color to the bean with some mottling around the 1c stage. Taken a minute or two further, some oil specs show up on some of the beans and they're slightly darker than the 1c level. And the one batch that I had the nerve to push a bit until it started to "sizzle" and really smoke(does this correspond to 2c?) turned out completely oil covered beans. I thought this oily batch was burnt but after a few days of rest it turned out to be a pretty good cup.
Another interesting observation ...creating a "house blend" with the left overs of all the 4 coffees I rec'd from SM makes a very good cup of coffee. There are no "holes" in the flavor profile when you mix 'em all together.