AKG K712PRO Open-Back, Over-Ear Premium Reference Class...

Most Helpful Review

"I've been daily driving the AKG K550mkII (and original K550 before that), which is a closed-back design that achieves near-unparalleled linearity in the mids and lows, for almost ten years. I'd estimate that I've spent 35000 hours wearing my current pair of headphones. Sadly, the cable on them has started to fail, so I decided I was due for an upgrade.I bought these for two reasons. First is that AKG felt like a brand I could trust - my dad's been rocking classic K240s since the early 1980s, and I've been on the 550s for nearly ten years too. Second, I read a lot of reviews of the K712 Pro praising their massive soundstage, realistic approach to bass, strong vocal clarity, detailed but not sibilant highs, and excellent comfort. Unfortunately what actually arrived failed to deliver on all of those points but one.Some quick background for this review: I'm driving these from an Onkyo receiver, which itself is being driven by TOSLINK (optical PCM). I listen to a fairly wide range of stuff - drum and bass (liquid, neuro, jump-up), metal, rock, alternative, chillout/triphop, ambient, breakcore, synthwave, and classic hiphop. I also watch a lot of YouTube. I'm not a fan of bass boosted stuff and I prefer a more neutral sound. I've got some background in signal processing, sound engineering, and music production, but I wouldn't call myself an audiophile.The best thing I have to say about these is that I'd give them a 4/5 for comfort. Good, not amazing. This is a subjective thing and depends on your head, of course, but for me they felt a tiny bit on the loose side, which led to the cups sliding down on my ears a little, which added a little pressure. If they sounded great, this would not have been a deal breaker at all. But they don't sound great at all.The sound that came out of these was a complete shock. The bass is over-present and bleeds heavily into the mids, everything is muddy and incoherent, and by the time you jack the volume up enough to get any clarity out of the highs they become horribly sibilant and fatiguing. The soundstage that had been heavily praised in reviews was completely missing, with little or no separation of instruments. With careful EQ'ing they sound borderline passable in some bass music, but as soon as there's anything spectrally dense they fall apart immediately. Even tracks with instruments widely separated in the mix (e.g. Seven Nation Army) suffer significantly. Vocal clarity is poor due to the overreaching low-end. Metal is completely unlistenable through them.Having seen the frequency response graphs in professional reviews, the over-present bass confused me a lot. The K712s were shown as having a fair amount of roll-off into the bass and sub-bass frequencies, but that did not match what I was hearing. Looking at the box, they mention a +3dB bass boost - something no review I saw talked about. Was I holding a completely different product?I believe the answer is, essentially, yes.A detail I had missed is that Samsung bought Harman/AKG in 2016, closed the AKG HQ in Austria, and moved production to Slovakia. A large portion of AKG's engineering talent left shortly thereafter, many of whom went on to start Austrian Audio. Most of AKG's legacy products were discontinued and replaced with Samsung's own lines under the AKG brand. While the K712 is an original AKG product, design changes have clearly been made as the years went by (likely in part due to the global parts shortage in 2019) but without the benefit of the institutional knowledge and experience of the staff who left after the Austrian HQ was closed.Whether or not Samsung is solely to blame for the quality of the modern K712 is up for debate, but it does highlight the fact that any brand reputation that AKG once carried is long since divorced from the actual quality and consistency of the products sold under that name.In the end, I returned these awful headphones.There is a happy ending, though: it turns out that the K550s are easy to repair, and I'll be doing a removeable cable mod tomorrow."