AKG K 420 Foldable Mini Headphone - Blue

The AKG K420 headphones sound nice. They are great if you want, or need high fidelity, semi-open, portable phones. I hate closed phones. The K420(s) sound like my AKG K240 MKII(s), if I were to boost the lows & highs on them a little bit The lows are deep and tight on the 420s. Kick drum and floor toms sound great! The highs are nice, except at very loud SPL listening levels, where at that point, they get a little harsh I use the 420s, for portable use, at mostly low to mid SPL listening levels. At low volume, upright bass sounds great, losing "some" definition at louder SPLs. At lower volume levels, The mild rise in the Hi and Low end frequency response is nice, ...sort of like hitting the "loudness button" on an old stereo, to compensate for the Fletcher-Munson curves of human hearing response at low SPL(s). A lot of listeners, would love them at loud sound levels.
When I go loud, at home, my go-to, is my K240MKII(s)
At home, I also listen to K240 sextetts and Sennheiser HD 414s.

This headphone has a quite good sound quality for its price. Its sound is very clear, the mids and highs are well detailled. The bass is tight but some recordings sound lacking bass. It needed a little bit more body and warmish on the sound. The ear pads have a bad quality. The pads from mine has last about 8 months. 

After a thorough market research and reading the good reviews on this website, I decided to buy the AKG K420 headphone about a year ago. It seemed perfect for my needs: low price, good sound quality, very portable and rather bad sound isolation, which I need so that I can hear the cars when riding my bike. As always, I bought it second hand because you usually get much better deals buying second hand; I still cannot believe the kind of great stuff I got for incredibly cheap prices.

 

So I got the headphone. They looked as new and they sounded as I hoped, no disappointment there! I've been using them every day, riding my bike to work and taking them with me almost everywhere I go. Unfortunately, after a few months, the left speaker started falling out every now and and died in the span of a few hours. I don't know much or anything about repairing headphones, which was confirmed in my attempt at saving them. I figured it might be due to abusive use by the previous owner so decided to buy another AKG K420 headphone, but this time a new pair. Unfortunately, after a few months, the exact same thing happened: the left speaker died on me again.

 

Taking them everywhere, I might not be the perfect headphones-host but I'm certainly not the worst and I've had cheaper headphones lasting for years. As this happened to me twice, I'm thinking this is not an isolated incident and felt like I had to create a profile to let the world know that the shelf life of these headphones is questionable, especially if you like to move them around.