Recording - November 2016 - 40

The drivers in the K872 will be quite familiar to anyone
who's used the K812. A whopping 53mm in size (most pro
headphones have 40 mm drivers), they sport dual-layer voice
coils with 1.5 Tesla magnets (that's a lot, trust me). They are
intended to provide an enormously wide frequency response
thanks to their ability to handle even the fastest transients.
They've been redesigned for closed operation, keeping or
improving upon the audio quality of the K812 while offering
the isolation needed in studios.
The uniquely shaped earcups are worth a detailed description on their own; as you can see in the photos, they're
designed to hug the natural contours of the skull and jaw, fitting tightly and effortlessly around the ears and providing an
unreal amount of isolation for a traditional headphone. This
idea was first made manifest in the K812, but has truly come
to fruition in the K872. In casual listening comparisons, I found
the K872 to be at least as isolating as my purpose-built Direct
Sound EX-29 isolation phones! The earcups are replaceable,
but the K872 doesn't come with a spare pair.
The K872 is packed in a rigid zippered case, and comes
with a 3-meter straight cable with a gold-plated miniplug and
1
/4" TRS adapter on one end and a LEMO connector on the
other. The LEMO is a scientific instrumentation connector that's
renowned for being ultra-high-quality yet tiny. Only one warning from a former physicist who worked with LEMO cables
every day for years: resist the temptation to unscrew the connector to see what's inside it, and always attach and detach
your cable with a straight push/pull motion, never turning or
twisting. It will explode into a pile of incredibly tiny components in your hand, and you will not be able to reassemble it
without specialized tools. (Don't ask me how I know this.)

AKG K872

B Y M I K E M E T L AY

For those who demand the very best, a whole new level of Oh My Gosh
In our March 2014 issue, Ears On covered several of AKG's
high-end studio phones, including the K812, a remarkable
open-back design that offers impeccable detail and clarity of a
sort rarely heard in headphones at any price point. At a very
not-cheap $1499, the K812 was a revelation, and my only
caveat was that as an open headphone, it was of less utility in
studio applications. Like many studio users, I lean heavily
toward closed designs for their isolation and firm bass, and I
must admit that I breathed a sigh of relief when I was able to
use that as an excuse to send the K812 back to AKG rather
than empty my wallet keeping it.
Well, I got a reprieve of nearly three years, but my luck just
ran out. A few weeks ago, just in time for this issue on monitoring and acoustics, AKG sent me the new K872, a closed
sibling to the K812, and... well, read on.
On paper
The K872 is a closed-back circumaural dynamic headphone
that bears a strong resemblance to the K812, but little resemblance to any other headphone I've tried recently. Reading
down the specs and feature list reveals innovation after innovation that separates the K872 from the common herd.
The lightweight, rigid frame of the K872 has a breathable
fabric-covered sling headband to take the weight of the phones
(390 g or about 14 ounces). This headband doesn't use the
spring-loaded adjustment mechanism that's found on most other
AKG phones; you set head size with a click-stop locking mechanism that I personally don't like quite as much as the springloaded design simply because it's not self-adjusting over time.
It does have the advantage of retaining the exact size of your
head once it's set.
40

RECORDING NOVEMBER 2016

Some specs: maximum input power of 300 mW, frequency
response of 5 Hz to 54 kHz, an astoundingly high sensitivity
of 112 dB SPL per volt, and an impedance of 36 ohms, making the K872 equally at home on a high-quality D/A converter
or a smartphone.
On ears
I described the K812 as meticulous to the point of being
painful, revealing problems in bad audio with an efficiency that
ranged from ruthless to downright sadistic. I also described it as
being one of the most glorious and revelatory headphones for
high-resolution audio work that I had ever heard. I expected
that the K872 would be, basically, a K812 but closed, but
what I got was significantly different... and even better.
The K872 is in fact detailed to the level of microscopic accuracy.
As with the K812, I found myself spotting tiny flaws in recordings
that I'd never noticed before, including tracks that have been part
of my reference list for years and which I thought I knew backwards and forwards. When you can hear the tiny 'thip' of where
an original analog tape was spliced with a straight rather than an
angled cut, or the subtle increase in noise as an engineer messes
with the gain staging of a preamp but doesn't hear it properly in
the heat of a tracking session, you know you've got a winner.
The K872 also makes for an impeccable editing tool in the digital realm. If you splice audio and you think you've hit a good
zero crossing point, the K872 will tell you for sure. If you're
doing spectral editing or deep audio cleanup on a problematic
recording, the K872 will probe into the finest details of the audio
you're working with. One could argue that headphones like this
are why DAW makers even worry about offering different kinds
of dither... with the K872, you can hear the differences easily.

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - November 2016