I was looking for something to fill in the gap between K240DF and K240 Monitor. Severely disappointed by alleged "successor", K701, I postponed purchase of K601 for many months, until I finally gave in.
And boy I was wrong.
In short K601 are the real successor of K701. Backwards as usual, AKG, but they did it.
There's literally nothing in the sound that could be improved upon...not to my ears at least. That however doesn't mean it's good for every usage.
Sound-wise, it's as flat as it can get. Non-saturated bass, balanced trebles and mids, just right. Perfecto.
If you examine the frequency graph on headphone.com, you'll see there are only very few dips from 20 to 10000Hz, otherwise it's clean, almost straight line.
Some reviewer hinted at "hard to like the sound". Let me explain what he/she probably meant by that.
K601 have almost no early reflections, just as open-back headphone should, but in fact even less than average. Therefore the "meat" of the sound is missing from some recordings as headphone shell doesn't contribute to the sound at all. Tracks are usually mixed on studio monitors in well treated room, so the engineer counts on some ER to be present in playback conditions.
That's not true for K601. Correct term to describe this effect would be using this sentence - K601 are dry sounding headphones.
As for comfort, it's comparable to K240, only the ears don't sweat as much. In other words, very comfortable.
Volume-wise, K601 are not the most efficient, but higher impedance helps to achieve lower currents and usually leads to lower distortion on amplifier level. Generally speaking, as long as your source is 1V RMS or above, with 15Ohm output impedance or lower, you're fine. At 1V you should be able to achieve 101dB, which is waay more than enough.
And boy I was wrong.
In short K601 are the real successor of K701. Backwards as usual, AKG, but they did it.
There's literally nothing in the sound that could be improved upon...not to my ears at least. That however doesn't mean it's good for every usage.
Sound-wise, it's as flat as it can get. Non-saturated bass, balanced trebles and mids, just right. Perfecto.
If you examine the frequency graph on headphone.com, you'll see there are only very few dips from 20 to 10000Hz, otherwise it's clean, almost straight line.
Some reviewer hinted at "hard to like the sound". Let me explain what he/she probably meant by that.
K601 have almost no early reflections, just as open-back headphone should, but in fact even less than average. Therefore the "meat" of the sound is missing from some recordings as headphone shell doesn't contribute to the sound at all. Tracks are usually mixed on studio monitors in well treated room, so the engineer counts on some ER to be present in playback conditions.
That's not true for K601. Correct term to describe this effect would be using this sentence - K601 are dry sounding headphones.
As for comfort, it's comparable to K240, only the ears don't sweat as much. In other words, very comfortable.
Volume-wise, K601 are not the most efficient, but higher impedance helps to achieve lower currents and usually leads to lower distortion on amplifier level. Generally speaking, as long as your source is 1V RMS or above, with 15Ohm output impedance or lower, you're fine. At 1V you should be able to achieve 101dB, which is waay more than enough.