[matthewh133]

Hahahaha that's classic.

 

[Danz03]

You mean it's not real? I'm so upset now, I was just about to order a pair! I was so looking forward to use them as my new portables! 

 
Quote:

The fact that a couple of people I've shown this to initially thought it was real speaks volumes...

 

[DavidMahler]

I think Kim Kardashian would know better than to think the K701 sounded good anyway and there's no money that AKG can tempt her with since she gets 40k for every tweet she makes on a product.  I don't think she'd ever endorse the K701 without AKG/Harman going bankrupt.....Her response to the headphone would be more like "eesh, they mess up my hair and I can't hear them out of my iPod, sucks"......but if she heard them out of a good amp her response would be "eesh, they mess up my hair and these suck"............ok I'm done with my K701 bash for the day.......guess i can still bash the Q701....oh wait! that's the same headphone for more $, DOH!

 

[bhanja_trinanjan]

Quote:

The fact that a couple of people I've shown this to initially thought it was real speaks volumes...

LOL... I didn't read that carefully enough... makes me laugh now that I believed it long enough to post.

 

[bhanja_trinanjan]

Quote:

I think Kim Kardashian would know better than to think the K701 sounded good anyway and there's no money that AKG can tempt her with since she gets 40k for every tweet she makes on a product.  I don't think she'd ever endorse the K701 without AKG/Harman going bankrupt.....Her response to the headphone would be more like "eesh, they mess up my hair and I can't hear them out of my iPod, sucks"......but if she heard them out of a good amp her response would be "eesh, they mess up my hair and these suck"............ok I'm done with my K701 bash for the day.......guess i can still bash the Q701....oh wait! that's the same headphone for more $, DOH!

I know u dislike the K-701, but doesn't the over-hyped bass on the T1 bug you? The bass on the T1 is a tad too much for classical, IMO

 

[Frank I]

The T1 does classical very well on my tube amp. If you are using the Burson or the budget headroom amp you may as well sell the T1 since your not using the right amps and have no synergy.

 

[MacedonianHero]

Quote:

The T1 does classical very well on my tube amp. If you are using the Burson or the budget headroom amp you may as well sell the T1 since your not using the right amps and have no synergy.

Exactly...and btw...real life DOES have bass...no matter what AKG would have you believe. Go to a real classical concert and you will hear bass...something the K701s have a very hard time portraying.
 
Listen to the LCD-2s...an EQ response as flat as a ruler and you will hear rich deep and impactful bass...just like I do in real life.

 

[DavidMahler]

Quote:

I know u dislike the K-701, but doesn't the over-hyped bass on the T1 bug you? The bass on the T1 is a tad too much for classical, IMO

I'll be honest.  There are some genres which the K701 does decently, namely chamber and solo piano music.  But these genres are too limited in my opinion for the K701 to be deemed a niche headphone and certainly a great headphone.  I appreciate though that even the comment which you responded to was a mocking and sarcastic one, you gave me the opportunity to say something serious...sometimes people mistake sarcasm on this site as being something other than what it is, but the reason I come down SO hard on the K701 is because of an emotional response I have to a few things about their history and moreover AKG's recent history.
 
When the K701 came out (or when I became aware of their existence which I think was shortly after they were initially debuted) I bought a pair.  I also had the HD650s at the time and I thought they were a very decent complimentary pair.  Unlike the HD650 they had an emphasis on soundstage as well as much more thinned out bass response which I agree has it's benefits when listening to certain classical music and also in the studio when plump bass can often be too "sultry" to mix properly...
 
When the K701 debuted they were truly the only in-production (easily purchasable) headphone (which I can recall) that had a clear emphasis on soundstage.  There was really no competitor for this attribute at the time, but sonically, I was never blown away by the K701.  It was not so much the bass response which kept me from loving the headphone (I know that the "lacking" bass response is where most people criticize the headphone), but in my opinion, the headphone posed much more bothersome problems.  Even in my early days of using the headphone (long before I had "better" pairs) the character of the upper midrange of the K701 was very poor to me.  It didn't matter which amp I paired them with, but the upper mids of the K701 felt coarse and at times nasal.  I find a lot of great headphones have a coarse upper midrange, but not to the degree of the K701. The K701 felt problematic, even when listening to chamber music (which I agree it does better than some other good headphones) a lot of times the strings would feel improperly rosined, because when bows are improperly rosined or deficient in rosin, the strings - especially cellos, develop a nasal and tinny character.  I kept finding the K701 revealed this blow over and over.  At the time I didn't have the money for an R10 or Orpheus (which I still can't afford) and I didn't want to invest in a K1000 system etc.  So I stuck with the K701 and kept my mouth shut on its shortcomings...
 
But then I began to notice some very strange things.  I began to notice that people and companies which reviewed the headphones for consumers said some very odd things about the headphone.  For one, headroom (a source I've always deemed as "as legitimate as a salesman can be, obviously want to make a sale and obviously will have some biases due to certain brands bringing in more cash, but still closer than other retailers to be honest about the products")...back to what I was saying.... Headroom revealed a frequency response graph for the K701 which was clearly wrong.  If you compared the K701 and HD650 it showed the K701 had more bass.  Today, headroom has drastically altered their original frequency response to show something much more accurate about its bass depiction.  Then there was....... iLounge which I've brought up in another thread, but long-story short, they reviewed K701 as an awesome (non amped) iPod accessory, a must-have for iPod users (right out of the iPod)  Not another headphone was reviewed in this fashion....there were no reference Beyers or reference Sennheisers reviewed.  What?  At the time I dismissed iLounge instead of AKG.  I didn't blame AKG for this mishap, BUT THEN......weirder things started happening......
 
K701 start popping up in numerous anime cartoons; I start finding numerous photographs of celebrities wearing the K701.  There are publicity shots of numerous of young musicians (not highly esteemed musicians either) wearing the K701.  Then Stephen Hoffman (a man whose ear I admire very much) states that K701 are his favorite headphone, but I recall him not liking them until he had them re-cabled.  I find this very odd.  Then there are people floating around this site who seem to love the K701 as if the headphones were the Orpheus.  These people are not interested in ever upgrading, the K701 is king and nothing will ever beat them - that's the attitude which they come off with to me and others.  And then Quincy Jones talking about how he always wanted to hear Thriller on something as good as the K701.  Sorry, I don't believe this.  Quincy Jones is a multi-millionaire and based on his reputation, I would believe he spends money on audio gear.  For him, to say the K701 are the best headphones he's ever heard, when there are clearly at least a dozen headphones (most in production) which are indisputably better (especially for Quincy's music) makes me angry.  Yes he's a sponsor and understand the reasons for this hyperbole, but he's also Quincy Jones and his reputation...He's sort of the Steven Spielberg of music, he doesn't need the money, he doesn't need the endorsement.  The endorsement bodes much more impressively for AKG than it does for Quincy Jones (recorded history's most lucrative producer).  I can digress and just say "well maybe Quincy truly believes these are great, sound is subjective anyway".....but if I stay logical, I cannot believe this, I just can't.  Not when........I read 6moons and they make assertions like the K701 standup against the HD800.  They must not pay attention to their older reviews.  Way back when......the HD600 and K701 were often compared and contrasted.  The HD800 was preferred over the HD600 indisputably by this site.  The HD600 was also deemed better than the K701, so how could the K701 standup against the HD800
 
And then there's the conversation I had with an AKG rep.  I quote "The K701 are just a better headphone than the K1000 and we were able to sell them for much cheaper." me: "you really think the K701 sound better, really?"  rep: "Well I've never heard a K1000.....but I'm told they are much better"
 
End thought on this: The K701 have developed a reputation based more on false and hyperbolic marketing than sonic impressiveness.  In my opinion, they are the only headphone in their pricerange and aimed at the "audiophile" to have developed their reputation this way.  And then when the Q701 came out and the K701 were dropped from production so that now in order to by a K701 new, you have to pay more (a LOT more) and you get nothing sonically better, is just ugly and AKG deserves to be scrutinized and dismissed by this community....at least contemporary AKG business ethic, maybe not the classic AKG which made much better products and had a much more respectable business model.  The Q701 are not going to be come the new Dre Beats.  They are not portable, they sound hardly audible out of a portable player, they are big and not particularly stylish to someone who cares about looking attractive and keeping their hairstyle in shape....these are the people who care about consumerisms like a product endorsement and neon green.
 
 
T1 with classical music......a lot of people talk about a bass hump.  I don't hear this, it must be an amp issue or I must like more bass than some people, but I truly don't believe there's an actual bass hump.  It has slightly more bass than the HD800, but not enough to call it humped.

 

[MacedonianHero]

Quote:

And then there's the conversation I had with an AKG rep.  I quote "The K701 are just a better headphone than the K1000 and we were able to sell them for much cheaper." me: "you really think the K701 sound better, really?"  rep: "Well I've never heard a K1000.....but I'm told they are much better"
 

 
Quote:

T1 with classical music......a lot of people talk about a bass hump.  I don't hear this, it must be an amp issue or I must like more bass than some people, but I truly don't believe there's an actual bass hump.  It has slightly more bass than the HD800, but not enough to call it humped.

 
And to this I completely agree with. There is ZERO bass hump. I think if one is used to the somewhat less than impactful bass performance of the K701 (

), then one might say anything more is a bass hump. When in reality, there is insufficient bass on the AKG offering.
 
The Headroom graph shows zero bass hump as well, simply as you said Dave, just slightly more bass than the HD800s:
 
http://graphs.headphone.com/graphCompare.php?graphType=0&graphID[]=2033&graphID[]=863
 

 

[rhythmdevils]

Nice post David, although if you start talking about the K701, the thread will soon become ridiculous. 
Quote:

Then there are people floating around this site who seem to love the K701 as if the headphones were the Orpheus.  These people are not interested in ever upgrading, the K701 is king and nothing will ever beat them - that's the attitude which they come off with to me and others.

I agree with you there.  I honestly don't hate the K701 at all even though some people probably think I do.  All I really feel is disappointment because I love AKG's previous work, and it was a backstep in my opinion. 
 
But the only reason I started posting about the K701 was because I noticed a few people were incredibly vocal about them being the best thing ever made, the most neutral, most accurate, the final say and reference for all other headphones to be judged.  Then I noticed a lot of people with less personal experience start posting similar things, and the idea was taking over head-fi.  So I just wanted to make the contrasting opinion heard so it was more of a balance.  It felt weird to just see all those threads pushing what seemed like a very one sided view.

 

[fatcat28037]

 
Quote:

That's truly awesome. Someone forward that to AKG and maybe they'll realize what an embarassment they've become!

X2
 
Someone desperately need smack the pi$$ out of the AKG marketing guys. They want you to visit Facebook to encourage them to reintroduce the K1000 and now they've introduced a signature edition cosmetically altered version of their most popular headphone. What are these people thinking. If they keep going in this direction they'll just be another "Beasts by Dr Dre". I am disappointed.
 

 

[rhythmdevils]

Quote:

If they keep going in this direction they'll just be another "Beasts by Dr Dre". I am disappointed
 

Sadly, the "Beats by Dr Dre" is selling really well, so if that is what happened, it would be considered a huge success on the part of AKG's marketing dept, who is not thinking about sound, or morals, or ethics, or anything other than selling headphones.

 

[Uncle Erik]

Quote:

When the K701 debuted they were truly the only in-production (easily purchasable) headphone (which I can recall) that had a clear emphasis on soundstage.  There was really no competitor for this attribute at the time....
 

One quibble - when the K-701 was released, the discontinued K-501 was still widely available NOS for months around $90-$100, IIRC.  When I had both, I found that the K-501 bested the K-701 in every category.
 
And I agree about the odd marketing coincidences that turn up with the K-701.  There's a whiff of viral about it.
 
Also agree that the T1 has slightly more bass than the HD-800, but no hump.  That was the impression I got from them.  Unfortunately, the extra bass pushed the T1 to where they don't sound realistic to me.  Otherwise, I liked the T1 and was all set to pull the trigger on a pair.  But I can't pay that much for something that's not quite right, when I already have a HD-800 that gets it right.  And the LCD2 is interesting... I'd like a pair, but might hold off until used ones start turning up regularly.

 

[fatcat28037]

 
Quote:

Sadly, the "Beats by Dr Dre" is selling really well, so if that is what happened, it would be considered a huge success on the part of AKG's marketing dept, who is not thinking about sound, or morals, or ethics, or anything other than selling headphones
 

 
Sad but true. The point I wanted to make is they would become just another company using hype,celebrity names and "cool" FOTM stuff to sell their headphones.  

 

[gsilver]

Is there anything inherently wrong with using celebrity names as marketing?
 
Even if the endorsement is ultimately meaningless, it's still a very common marketing tool. It also works.
 
Personally, I think the green that the use is tacky, but who is to say that people who want such a color shouldn't be given the option?