I bought these headphones (along with a new Retina Display MacBook Pro) to both travel and professionally edit with (I'm a LA-based Entertainment Industry professional, director/editor, so sound quality is incredibly important to me) and I read all the reviews I could find (here on Amazon and other sites) before I decided to purchase these AKG headphones.
I could not be happier with them.
I bought them right before a 14-hour flight from LA to the Hong Kong, used them the entire time I was awake on the flight. Then, I spent literally a week-and-a-half straight, editing a complex project where I was mixing music, VO and sound effects (and visuals of course) in a film I was making. These headphones were a joy to mix with. I felt the sound quality was very balanced, nuanced and detailed, and allowed me to mix at a very Pro level for being in a hotel room on a laptop.
Additionally, I love the design of these headphones - as they fold origami-like into their travel case and come with 2 different lengths of tangle-free headset jacks and worked beautifully with my iPhone and my MacBook Pro. Also, the build quality is like that of an iPhone or Mac as well: finished aluminum & leather and very solid, detailed and well thought out.
But really the best feature was the noise canceling. This was easy to test on an international flight. I tested them by simply listening to both music and a film while in-flight and the difference in detailed sound quality when the noise canceling was 'On' versus 'Off' was night and day. After testing, I was so glad that I bought a pair with noise canceling instead of another pair I was looking at that didn't.
Lastly, if I had a small compliant, it would be that after prolonged, continued use (maybe 4 hours), the pads would make my ears a little sore. This was a very minor annoyance, and I'm not sure this could be avoided under any circumstance, and I totally love them either way.
Absolutely 5 Stars!
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Broken plastic on both earpieces. Support is unavailable.
First problem with the headphones was no noise cancellation. I tried to contact support through their web portal (BTW, AKG doesn't give customer support on consumer line products, they outsource it to Harman Kardon), but after filling the form and clicking submit it gives 404 unavailable. I wrote to their support email with no response. In order to get thing moving I had to write to any AKG email address I could find, and finally someone contacted me back and proposed to replace the unit. Important: it happened during the first year after I purchased it, so it was covered by the warranty. It took another month to receive a replacement.Now I have the plastic broken on both earpieces. It's been about a year and a half since the replacement took place, which means I'm out of warranty (and out of luck apparently). My hope was to repair the headphones at my expense, or to get some kind of discount toward the purchase of a different AKG model (I'm never going to buy K495NC again since it clearly has some design/manufacturing faults).Again, web form didn't work for me. I wrote directly. This is the response from support after a month of waiting for an answer:"We don't repair headphones that's why we replace your unit last time even though you're out of warranty I also checked your case and you already have plenty of replacements. We did our part on helping you but unfortunately since you are out of warranty and received a one time replacement already then the system won't allow anymore replacement."And they closed the case!Judge for yourself if you want to own this faulty model.Note: I own two other AKG headphones from the professional line for many years (k-240 is about 15 years old) without a single problem.
