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Over the years, different variants of the K240 have garnered a reputation of being the base-level standard when it comes to studio monitoring headphones. Budding audiophiles the world over take their first steps into serious listening with these headphones, and for good reason. Find out why.
Often times professional monitoring equipment can make for some great audiophile gear. The AKG K240 MKII is one such case in point. It comes from the reference line of products from AKG and unlike most reference "grade" products, this one is actually used in studios along with the other popular model in the series – the AKG K271 MK II. At the time of review we had both these sets with us and through this review you'll find a lot of comparisons being made. Though what we found was fairly surprising: in many aspects the AKG K240 MK II is slightly better than the K271, which is supposed to be a notch higher in the pecking order.
Design and build
The AKG K240 MKII a true blue reference set from the AKG stables. Being studio monitors they’ve got everything that we’ve by now come to expect from cans in this class – long replaceable cables and superlative comfort. Not the prettiest looking headphones thanks to the mostly plastic housing, but they’ve got a fairly functional look at least. They’re quite light and the self adjusting headband does its job of propping the K240 on your head for those extended listening sessions. The K240 is semi-open unlike K271 which is fully closed. There is also another gimmicky difference between the two sets: there is an auto-off mechanism on the K271 which switches off the music as soon as you take them off. We spent a couple of minutes trying to figure out exactly how this works and jumped from theories of proximity sensors to finally what turned out to be a small little switch attached to the headband which does the trick.