[richard51]

I just listened to Larry Goldings on hammond organ or piano, some jazz albums with the guitarist Peter Bernstein i like very much too and the drummer Bill Stewart....

I never listened to so much good sound coming from headphones....The albums are not badly recorded for sure but are not audiophile graded either....The headphone make the difference ....

In one sentence, with all my 8 others headphones i was always closing my eyes to improve my intimacy with soundstage and improve the perception of details without visual distractions, because the details were remaining inside my head; with the AKG K340 i kept my eyes open to see the musicians better, outside my head, in front of me, beside me or slightly behind me...

In many good recording of classical albums often musicians fill the room in an imaginary soundfield coming from the church, or hall where the music was born and recorded, the original recorded soundfield flow in my room and there is no more link with my head....

I am astounded by that and happy......

The K340 are not a " light" headphone nor a "dark" one , nor neutral, they are dynamic yes, with a beautiful timbre near the real instrument timbre but more than that, each instrumental timbre exist, not on a static surface, but each one dance so to speak in his own volume of space....They come and live in an other planet compared to all my now other useless headphones....

I just discovered that they are hungry to eat more bass and gulp more higher frequencies... They sound better after a meal on that diet....The opposite of my other headphones who produced distortions easily at the 2 end of the spectrum because increasing the frequencies at the two end simultaneously put them out of balance very rapidly....The contrary of what the K340 is asking from....The reason is because the K340 own a crossover well designed at 4KHZ separating high and bass frequencies in a natural way at the right spot, relatively to the tone, body and presence of voice,piano and guitar which are our day to day acoustic brain nourishment ...

Thanks to Sansui tone controls for this discovery about the best way to feed them .... But beware, many tone controls introduce a distortion of their own, this distortion will be easily detected if feed to the sensitive K340.... Implementing tone controls is an art lost nowadays, an art which belong to an audiophile age thinking for the masses as an educated crowd, an art now bygone, because lost definitively in consumerism .... The audiophile crowd is reduced nowadays more to an "elite" few with money who dont gives a damn about "useless" tone controls with 20,000 bucks amplifier.... They really think higher "good sound" is only synonymus with the last up to date and the higher price paid... The good news is useful equalization come with many product nowadays at low cost, like in my dac, our age is also a great era in his own term different from the past...

If you own the K340 be patient and work on them, around them and for them.... They will blossom.....It just takes me 4 years to figure it out...I am half joking only here... The K340 are difficult to figure out because they are very different beast than any other regular headphone, which, nevermind their type, dont own a crossover nor 5 passive internal resonators which then induce together their own unheard specific conditions to be able to reach an optimal level of S.Q.

For me if an headphone is good for a musical genre and not so good in another one, it is because the headphone is badly designed....All music is sublime with a good headphone....

I was happy with my speakers/room , it takes me so much time to figure how to do it at no cost....I was sad to loose the house and the dedicated audio room ....Now i am happy again with a low cost system even improving on my past room/speakers....Incredible luck but with some work for me to make it happen....

I hope my review of the K340 will be useful in suggesting some direction....And sparing to some people thousands of dollars for a high end headphone of today and instead grabbing at peanuts cost a high end headphone of the past, an unsurpassed one for me with a technology never imitated nor improved since alas!....

 

[richard51]

Here the history of AKG illustrated in 12 pages.....

http://recordinghacks.com/pdf/akg/AKG_History.pdf

 

[richard51]

The main problem, remember it, for the AKG K340 is the limited life of the electret ... Nobody it seems know how many decades it will last....
I must confide with a sligh tremors in my body that i am very much afraid and nervous thinking about that....

 

[richard51]

I read, i dont remember where, that the AKG k340 are forgiven headphones for bad files or for bad recordings .......

Sorry, but it is the opposite, they reveal very much the recordings conditions and the negative effect of too much compression or loss in files....

But pounding my head about it and about why this reviewer said so..... I think he is right at the end, the K340 are one of the most magical and pleasurable headphones to listen to even with less well recorded files or bad one....

But they dont forgive any bad recording or bad files cues for sure ....

Why?

Because they are so good with a good recording and a good file that it is difficult to forget and go to a bad recording after that, even if they sound better with a bad recording than many other headphones, their problem is they sound way too much good with good recording for doing so....

Imagine an old jazz classic badly recorded, with the sound in the center of your head, and no tremendous bass nor any sublime highs frequencies to reproduce , nor real 3-d volume sound holography and all in the head.... Yes, the K340 can sound like most ordinary headphones at any price.....

When i listened to my speakers/room with mediocre file or album, the same was going on with a bad recording , the music stayed in the center with no hues in the timbre , no 3-d holography, and like a dead surface of sound....No harmonies filling the room and coming around me like in numerous glorious recordings...


I must confide that the only bad recordings i listen to these days are the rare pure transcendent interpretation in classical music without which life is impossible to live.... Szeryng playing Bach sonatas and partitas, it is truly miraculously deep then i forget to pay attention to the bad sound.... And i listen these works also with a good recording and a good interpretation, even if it is not so intense compared to Szeryng, i listen to it times to times in casual listening also and keep Szeryng for rare sacred ceremony of listening where sound dont matters but where my attention must be completely immersed in the music........

We cannot listen with this undivided attention for music each hour, then for casual listening i take great pleasure in good sound....

 

[richard51]

An observation not so frequently made about the K340:

They become so good at higher db level that we are tempted to rise the volume, then beware and keep the volume a bit lower than what your first impression suggest and desire want ....

 

[JAnonymous5150]

An observation not so frequently made about the K340:

They become so good at higher db level that we are tempted to rise the volume, then beware and keep the volume a bit lower than what your first impression suggest and desire want ....

You know even in just the last week alone you have posted writings covering a ton of good info about the K340s and your mods and improvements to your pair. Have you ever thought about putting all your thoughts on the K340s into a document, saving it to a Google Drive (or other cloud storage), and then putting a link to it in your signature? That way if anyone were yo read any of your posts and want to know all the info without having to go back through the thread and piece it together, they could just click the link and save the document for themselves.

Onviously, it's up to you to decide if you think it's worth the effort, but given how passionate you are about it I think it could be a great resource for K340 owners. Just some food for thought.

 

[richard51]

i just finish to listen to a fado singer Mariza....
A great singer....

It is the first time i hear the big difference between the two guitarra types used in Fado so much clearly ; the high refinement of the fado guitar resembling a peach and the traditional more bassy guitar,....

The high frequencies are honey and the bass incredibly deep and clear.... No other headphones i ever used touch the K340 on this count...

The voice is pure and very real to me ears because the K340 own mids marvellous but never put them at the first row....

Are they neutral?

Probably, but the K340 define itself by his rendering of timbre with a natural and a perfection i ever listen to ever else.... BUT there exist many headphone which will put the mids on the front row and which own marvellous mids frequencies....At first listen someone can prefer that, i prefer complete natural r3endering with no emphasis... In this sense they are neutral....

But are they neutral really?
No to my ears they are slightly warm even if they gives details a cold analytical headphone will give....

But the best way to describe them is not with audiophile words about warm, cold, and neutral, they are musical because they let the voices and instruments speaks in their own 3-d volume of space and not on a surface where we can see so to speak highs and bass frequencies linearly distributed....

Contrary to what some had claim, the bass and the high in this headphone never interact negatively at all, thanks to the hybridation, the opposite opinion come from the uncontrolled resonance and vibrations and the wrong pads mainly ....

 

[Davidzak64]

The main problem, remember it, for the AKG K340 is the limited life of the electret ... Nobody it seems know how many decades it will last....
I must confide with a sligh tremors in my body that i am very much afraid and nervous thinking about that....

Maybe the electret's can be recharged or even replaced?

 

[richard51]

Thanks

JAnonymous5150​

for your generous opinion, but all my posts are on the 2 or 3 last pages.... Easy to read....

And to be frank i like dialoguing and i dont think my opinions are so much important compared to all other people written opinions and reviews ... I am too passionate to be completely objective for sure....
You are very kind to me i thank you from my heart....

 

[Davidzak64]

i just finish to listen to a fado singer Mariza....
A great singer....

It is the first time i hear the big difference between the two guitarra types used in Fado so much clearly ; the high refinement of the fado guitar resembling a peach and the traditional more bassy guitar,....

The high frequencies are honey and the bass incredibly deep and clear.... No other headphones i ever used touch the K340 on this count...

The voice is pure and very real to me ears because the K340 own mids marvellous but never put them at the first row....

Are they neutral?

Probably, but the K340 define itself by his rendering of timbre with a natural and a perfection i ever listen to ever else.... BUT there exist many headphone which will put the mids on the front row and which own marvellous mids frequencies....At first listen someone can prefer that, i prefer complete natural r3endering with no emphasis... In this sense they are neutral....

But are they neutral really?
No to my ears they are slightly warm even if they gives details a cold analytical headphone will give....

But the best way to describe them is not with audiophile words about warm, cold, and neutral, they are musical because they let the voices and instruments speaks in their own 3-d volume of space and not on a surface where we can see so to speak highs and bass frequencies linearly distributed....

Contrary to what some had claim, the bass and the high in this headphone never interact negatively at all, thanks to the hybridation, the opposite opinion come from the uncontrolled resonance and vibrations and the wrong pads mainly ....

• Power Output: 90W into 8Ω (stereo)
• Frequency Response: 1Hz to 300kHz
• Distortion: 0.003%
• Damping Factor: 150
• Speaker Impedance: 6 to 16Ω

This beast surely makes the K340 sing. It puts out plenty of solid voltage from that they thrive on.

 

[richard51]

Maybe the electret's can be recharged or even replaced?

Alas! i dont read anywhere that it is so..... 15 years ago perhaps....But i dont think AKG now had electret replacement in store....

I like them so much, i sense shivers at the idea to loose them.... Happuily i am 71 years old and with luck they will die after my death....

Anyway i sincerely think that the K340 rival anything that exist at any price even if they are not exactly on par for sure on all counts and all acoustic parameters, with the most costly and well designed headphones for sure....They have their own unique grabbing way to render sound experience in a manner no other can rival.... They own 5 Helmholtz resonators + hybridation of two types of headphone drivers, no other headphone ever succeed in that...

But the killer argumwent is the ratio S.Q. /price...

Who want to pay 5,000 bucks or more to rival them or even to beat them?

Not me.....

I am not even sure this is possible on all acoustic aspects in play....

 

[richard51]

This beast surely makes the K340 sing. It puts out plenty of solid voltage from that they thrive on.

Yes you bet....
I paid 300 bucks 5 or 6 years ago for this amplifier because i loved my Sansui AU 7700 with my room/speakers so much....

I only used this amplifier with my K340 because the AU 7700 was perfect in my room...

But with a so sensitive headphone the lower noise floor is mandatory and now this pairing beat my past acoustic room/speakers...

There exist better amplifier than this Sansui Alpha, but for the S.Q. /price ratio i doubt it is possible to beat it....


I bought my first Sansui long time ago because i was impressed by the task Sansui imposed on itself in the sixty decade to create a SS design that will reproduce exactly their mythical tubes amplifier... They work on that task for 15 years i think and they reveal the results in a test where people listened the two amplifiers and they succeed... This convince me that Sansui was able to design a S.S. amplifier rivaling tubes and i bought the AU 7700 for 100 bucks (from a guy at 5 streets from my home at the time ( yes i was lucky) and never look back....

These Sansui amplifiers are so good they create a cult like market.... For a reason....

My repairman said that the tone controls section of my Sansui AU 7700 rivalled in quality and most of the times overcome most other amplifiers he had seens... I believe him because of the sound quality....

The tone controls of the AU-7700 was way more sophisticated than those of the alpha series....But this alpha series enter the market at a times where tone controls where less asked for and anyway the noise floor of the alpha series is lower.... And their more simpler tone control than those of the AU series are anyway without negative at all....

The alpha series was the swan song of the best amplifiers Sansui ever designed.... I studied for months before buying my first Sansui.... Ihad read for sure all there is to read on the internet about them.... I am very obsessive buyer.... I did the same for the K340, studying all possible headphones contender because i was always disappointed by my other headphone, 2 electrostastics, 2 planars, many dynamics....

 

[Davidzak64]

Alas! i dont read anywhere that it is so..... 15 years ago perhaps....But i dont think AKG now had electret replacement in store....

I like them so much, i sense shivers at the idea to loose them.... Happuily i am 71 years old and with luck they will die after my death....

Anyway i sincerely think that the K340 rival anything that exist at any price even if they are not exactly on par for sure on all counts and all acoustic parameters, with the most costly and well designed headphones for sure....They have their own unique grabbing way to render sound experience in a manner no other can rival.... They own 5 Helmholtz resonators + hybridation of two types of headphone drivers, no other headphone ever succeed in that...

But the killer argumwent is the ratio S.Q. /price...

Who want to pay 5,000 bucks or more to rival them or even to beat them?

Not me.....

I am not even sure this is possible on all acoustic aspects in play....

I can honestly say that I have not heard a better magical 3d imaging sounding all-around hp, but then again have not heard too many of the gourmet high dollar stuff. That being said. I do own and have owned some great sounding cans. But the 340 is my favorite.

 

[richard51]

We are in the same club....

But about all other costly headphones, like omega Stax top of the line or anything over 3 thousand dollars, one thing is sure they CANNOT beat the K340 on all acoustic counts and factors at the same time : dynamic, timbre, higher frequencies rendering, three dimensional holography, bass i feel with my feet because with them on my head i sense my floor vibratring if there is deep bass in the recording or punch in my stomach if bass is punchy .... For example the Omega Stax top model dont do that if we read reviews... None of my 2 past Stax compared to them, even if it was not top of the line Stax i owned that said something to me, their bass is very good but not like an undergound clear tremors....And the higher frequencies on my K340 annihilate my 2 past Stax models too ...More air and more honey like...

And how many costly headphones are 3 dimensional ? None og the 8 other one i listen to..... How many headphone are able sometimes relative to the recording to have a soundstage filling my room out of my head completely completely and in a natural way ? None of them, save the Beyerdynamic DT990 pro which has a huge soundstage but always in my head and not 3-d holographical...


I forgot this : how many headphones give a natural transparency that has nothing artificial , how many less good headphone present a transparency related mainly to the insistance on the high frequency register ?...The top of the line successor to the K340, the akg k701 i own for exemple precisely did just that ... The perfect independance of the bass register and high frequency register in the case of the K340 is one of their secret....Those who pretend the opposite simply never adress the vibrations of the shells problem, a problem which exist to a variable degree in most headphones...

How many had higher frequencies rivaling any electrostatic? Save the K340.... It is the first time in my life that i had thirst for high frequencies....

The most important point is their ridiculous low price on the used market, because they are old design, because electret had a limited life duration , because most people under appreciated them because they never learn how to tame them and modify them or optimize them... They absolutely need optimization to shine.... They can sound not so much good, i remember that introductory phase of my first hours with them ....I kept them because i guess about their potential and they were all in all at first listening not worst nor better than my other not so perfect headphones anyway....

When the time was ripe, when i was in the obligation to close my speakers/room, i concentrated my thinking on them, because all the others were already like they may be at their peak : just ok for me nothing more .... I wanted more than just ok, after my speakers/room...





"I can honestly say that I have not heard a better magical 3d imaging sounding all-around hp, but then again have not heard too many of the gourmet high dollar stuff. That being said. I do own and have owned some great sounding cans. But the 340 is my favorite. "

 

[Majoox]

The main problem, remember it, for the AKG K340 is the limited life of the electret ... Nobody it seems know how many decades it will last....

The ageing of the electrets is already noticeable. Even worse: The series variations are due to differences in the thickness and polarisation of the electret, the production tolerances were high at that time. Just as Heinz Renner, the developer of the K1000, could only produce the first 5000 copies with a FS of 25 Hz under very strong factory selection. Most of them were rubbish and did not reach the target.

AKG is experienced with electrets and the technology of the K340 was also used in microphones such as the C412 and the D99 dummy head "Harry". I notice differences due to ageing especially in the range above 8 kHz, some still seem "fresh", some are already more covered there. Electrets will loss of charge. According to a former employee at AKG, from who I bought various headphones, they should be harmless within 50 years. The sensitivity and the volume will decrease, but the slow ageing should not be noticeable with normal usage (as you get used to it). In any case, no K340 will ever sound the same as it did when buyed in 1979.

I once had contact with a specialist around electrostats like a Jecklin Float as well as Stax and he said that a remagnetisation of the electret would be difficult and not worth the price. Replacement electrets for the K340 were available until the early 2000s from a German company namend "RW Soundsystem".

Serious channel imbalances are always due to temperature fluctuations (attic, uninsulated basements) or UV light.

Regarding my problem with the resonating metal from the electret: Simply print a new grill with a 3D printer.