The AKG K512 MKII

Around six years ago, I had a pair of AKG headphones - the K512 MKII. The audio quality was sufficiently good, but my ears aren’t picky - to me, much more important pros of those headphones were the weight and breathability. After the AKGs wore off, I got a pair of Sennheiser HD 518s and used it as my main desktop headset for several years. When the ear cushions were no longer in an acceptable state, l looked up a replacement and found that it would cost me around $40. The K512 MKII were around $55 back in the day, and while their sound quality does not rival that of the Sennheiser HD 518, they were much more comfortable. Imagine my surprise when I found out that they were no longer being produced and there was nothing remotely resembling their design in AKG’s current lineup. A couple of questions arise.

• Why would a headphone manufacturer decommission such a good product?
• Why do all the current designs in this price range differ significantly from the K512 MKII in all the worst ways?
• Why is nobody producing clones of such an exceptional headphone design?

Now surely not everyone would call the K512 MKII “exceptional”. Not everyone is as bent on comfort as I am. Most people would choose the Sennheiser cans vecause of their superior audio quality, even if they were comfortable only for the first half an hour of wearing (luckily, they’re not so bad). To me, it’s very important to be able to wear your headphones for three hours and not even remember that you have them on. That being said, I imagine I’m not conpletely alone here.

Let me tackle the most puzzling question first. I really have no idea why I’m not able to find headphones designed similarly to the K512 MKII on, say, Alibaba. I’m guessing that’s caused by intellectual property laws - maybe it’s patented, maybe some automatic copyright protections apply, I don’t know. Maybe everyone is too busy copying Apple to realise that my favourite pair of headphones ever existed.

As to AKG decommissioning the headphones… I think the K512 MKII might have become a victim of their own success. AKG realised that if they kept making entry level models that (for an average Joe like me) would rival the top of their line, their RnD investment would not pay off. Kind of like Samsung deciding to not include waterproofing in their mid-range smartphone line. The 2017 A5 was an exceptional smartphone that ticked off all the boxes on my personal flagship checklist back in the day while boasting a price tag of around a half of the flagship range. In 2019, I was left with the flagship choices just because Samsung took off a couple of rubber seals from their mid range models. In a similar vein, I now stopped using AKG products altogether just because they decided to make their entry models uncomfortable. It might be an overall headphone design snafu - I didn’t try on any of the >$200 headphones from AKG - but I’m fairly certain the materials on the more expensive models are of much higher quality while staying similar in manufacturing costs.

There is a broader underlying theme that I’m seeing in the headphone market. I think there used to be more headphone models from manufacturers like AKG or Bose, and now most companies decided to streamline their product lines. It’s common these days to have one flagship headphones model dedicated to the general market (as opposed to the audiophile community) and, thanks to Apple, we can be sure this model will be wireless. I’m going to keep whining about this fact until Bluetooth becomes usable. I’m going to keep whining about this fact until companies producing headphones start treating wireless connectivity seriously.

I don’t know and I’ll probably never know: was K512 MKII’s demise a conscious effort or plain old neglect? All I know is that I can’t buy them anymore. They still remain the best pair of headphones I’ve ever owned.