Recording - January 2013 - 30

B Y M I K E M E T L AY

AKG K702
AKG has a long and storied history of designing headphones for casual listeners and studio professionals alike. The line includes famous headphones like the standard-setting K271 (reviewed September 2003 and still this reviewer’s favorite mid-priced headphone) released in 2001; the K240, used everywhere from full-orchestra sessions to rock tracking (and another stalwart in my studio), released in 1976; and the user-controllable K180 of 1969. How do I know all these dates? They’re printed in the little historical brochure that came with AKG’s latest headphone, the K702 65th Anniversary Edition. Tricked out in a special color scheme of sexy charcoal grey with blue trim, this new limitededition headphone adds a unique commemorative look to a design that’s attention-getting even in its standard version. AKG started building headphones in 1949, and the K702 represents the company’s latest pinnacle of sonic excellence. Let’s see what all the fuss is about, shall we?

65th Anniversary Edition Headphones
and sensitivity to weight and pressure makes AKG’s phones more comfortable as a rule than phones with even the cushiest solid headbands, and that holds true here. The K702 simply does not fatigue the listener through extended wear; I started to notice skull pressure after about six hours under the phones, and I should note that there was no ear fatigue yet by that point. (More on that later.) The first thing I noticed about the K702’s sound was how gloriously open it was; there was none of the congested, smeared feeling you can get with some cheaper headphones. Transient response was brilliantly fast, making treble clean and clear, and the bass extension was extraordinary... when you listen to the string bass on pretty much any track from Sting’s Ten Summoner’s Tales, you don’t just get hints of the fundamental from the harmonics, it’s all right there where it should be. However, there is no hint in any of this extended frequency response of particular areas being hyped or exaggerated; the overall sound is balanced and even, and songs present themselves with all their details in place and nothing subdued or too far forward. When I loaned the phones to Tom Hawley, President of Music Maker Publications and an avid recording musician with an extensive collection of high-end phones, he commented, “These phones have essentially taken the one part of the K701’s sound that I didn’t like—what I felt was a lack of solid, extended and believable bass—and corrected it. It’s all there now, solid without being exaggerated or in your face.” And it did all this with essentially no ear fatigue at all, even after extended listening sessions (admittedly at moderate levels—I’m not stupid). If you’re worried about what headphones can do to your ears, the K702 will reward safe listening levels with no fear of missing anything. One of the more telling sets of tests with these headphones was switching between files with differing levels of lossy compression, from 192 kbps MP3 to 320 kbps to full AIFF files. Almost anyone can tell the difference between heavily compressed files and uncompressed in an A/B test with good headphones; a few golden-eared folks claim to be able to tell the difference between 320K and full AIFF, but my ability to spot that difference is usually hit-or-miss. That is, until I put on the K702. It’s actually a bit frightening how well these phones show off compression artifacts: the slight sizzle on hi-hats, the strange phase effects one gets sometimes, smearing of transients... suddenly you find yourself wondering if you’ve managed to damage the phones

A special edition of an amazingly comfortable and beautiful-sounding headphone

Out of the box The K702 is an open-back dynamic headphone, a circumaural design whose spec sheet quotes 105 dB/V sensitivity, max input power of 200 mW, an impedance of 62 ohms, a frequency response of 10 Hz to 39.8 kHz, and a net weight of only 8.3 ounces. This light weight, combined with AKG’s well-known spring-loaded headband (“genuine leather”!), produces a level of wearing comfort that is pretty much unparalleled to this reviewer. The K702 comes with a 3-meter detachable straight cable that attaches to the left earcup, and is terminated with a gold-plated mini plug with screw-on 1/4" TRS adapter. A coiled cable is available as a separate option. There’s not much more to say about the phones themselves, so it’s time to move on to how they perform. Onto the ears I burned in the K702s by playing music through them for a steady 24 hours, and then set up my usual listening tests. I basically lived in the headphones for a week or two, with breaks to loan them to colleagues whose opinions I respect in this area, listening to everything from classical music to acoustic Americana and folk to heavy-duty rock and electronica. I want to start by reiterating my point about comfort. I have said many times in headphone reviews that my particular head shape
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RECORDING January 2013

Recording - January 2013

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