AKG K 28 Noise Reducing Headphones

Posted 08/24/2005 at 10:14am | by

0

Comments

Print

AKG manufactures some fabulous headphones, but we’re disappointed with the company’s noise-reducing model K 28 NC. The phones sound great and do a fine job reducing ambient noise, but they’re damnably uncomfortable to wear.

Headphones can help you retreat into your own private acoustic world; and with the acoustics of the outside world getting louder and more intrusive with each passing day, headphone designers have come up with technology designed to combat it: noise-canceling circuitry.

Tiny microphones on each closed-back earphone monitor ambient noise and send the low-frequency signals they pick up to a small module you can clip on your belt. Turn on the module and it reverses the polarity of these signals to generate a mirror-image signal, which it then pipes back to the headphones to cancel the waveform of the ambient noise.

In our tests, AKG’s noise-reduction circuitry was effective at reducing—but not eliminating—everything from vehicle road noise to the aggravating whine of our PC’s cooling fans. And to be fair, AKG doesn’t claims these headphones will altogether cancel ambient noise. We were nonetheless disappointed to discover that the noise-reducing circuitry generated a little noise of its own even when no ambient noise was present. Fortunately, this noise had no discernible impact on music, dialog, or sound effects from the CDs, movies, and games we tested the headphones with.

When folded, the headphones fit into a 6x4-inch nylon bag (included). But their compact size carries an annoying trade-off: Because there’s no way to adjust the size of the headband before its on, you’re forced to drag the earphones down to your ears with two or three tugs while tiny rubber pads on the headband threaten to pull your hair out by the roots. Take the phones off and they retract to their original size, which means the hair-pulling is not a one-time event. With the phones in place, the earmuffs hugged our ears so tightly that we felt like Uncle Fester wearing his infamous vise-clamp hat.
We’d really enjoy traveling with and listening to these headphones—if we could only stand wearing them.
—Michael Brown

Month Reviewed: September 2005
Verdict: 6
URL: www.akg.com