AKG K 701 Headphones

I came across these headphones on the AKG website, and immediately fell in love with the style, I love how AKG combines the white main body, with the genuine leather headband, and silver accents. At a average price of 350+ dollars, these are not your average cans. The transducers(Speakers) used are dynamic 40mm units that deliver alot of low oompf, and screaming highs. Like a car with a very powerful engine that needs more gasoline, this baby requires a little more power to operate. If you plan to use these with a Ipod mini, nano,a shuffle, or a equivalent size device, guess again, as these headphones will not perform too well under the low power conditions in one of these. Back to the can themselves. Being hand made, and numbered in Vienna,Austria, these are AKG's flagship units. AKG ships these in a black box with the specification, and design sleeve over it. When you take off the outer sleeve the box is total black with "expect" on the front, then open the flap, and under that it reads "and discover", and finally in the space between the actual headphones reads "perfection".The K-701's ship with a simple, yet neat stand to display/store them.
The recommended time for break in for these headphones is 100 hours, allow them to operate for at least 200 hours, they start off needing alot of power to run, and eventually bed in and really start to pound bass, and using less power.
The Sony PSP can be used, but it takes most of the volume bar to operate, but it does so at a nice volume, computers, and higher output mp3 players should find to issue in running these headphones, like mentioned above, usage with a small mp3 player, such as a iPod shuffle, may not do too well. The cloth earpads are very comfortable, and the auto-adjusting headband actually automatically adjusts, via four elastic rods, they are also very light for their size.
The transducers are set to reflect most of the sound pressure to the outer ear, giving much better realism in surround sound, and bass response, also this makes them safer to listen to over extended periods of time.
For testing the realism, and frequency response, I first used several opera singers, as well as Mariah Carey's music to go through all of the octives, the K-701's performed excellently. For bass I used various rap songs, and again excellent performance. When used with a dvd player(Xbox), and a full Dolby Digital reciever, the K-701's really shine, with very accurate audio targeting response. For gaming, and Nvidia equipped computer, and Doom 3 was the test, and once again excellent sound accuracy, actually sounded like a demon was truly sneaking up behind me. I highly recommend this headphone, for those who like the best, because in my experience, these are the best. If you can pony up the dough go for it, it's worth the money!