About seven years ago I was doing a lot of home recording on a PC with a breakout recording interface. Around that time I purchased a pair of AKG K-240 Monitor headphones, which worked well with my powered interface. I remember that the music sounded good, but in the age of iPods, MP3s, and earbuds, I too was guilty of sacrificing quality for portability.

I was going through some old boxes yesterday, and found them again. I immediately plugged them in to make sure they still worked. Did they ever.

By design, these headphones are studio monitors, part of which means they have a higher impedance then typical consumer headphones, so you can send a lot more power to them without worrying about damaging the headphones, a typical studio situation with powered boards, and unmastered/unmixed audio. So when plugged into my iPod or laptop, I have to crank the volume all they way up to get them to a normal listening level. I decided to look them up, and discovered an updated version is available for lower output level devices!

Anyway, I started going through the music I've collected the past few years that has only been listened to on my home stereo, earbuds, or car stereo, and was completely blown away at all the little nuances, and richness that is lost with many consumer level headphones and speakers. Albums like With Teeth, by Nine Inch Nails, where there are a lot of spacious synth parts, and incredible drums by Dave Grohl don't just sound great, they sound incredible, and encompassing.

I started clicking away in iTunes going from album to album, and without looking, almost always I could tell just by listening if the song had been encoded at 128kbps MP3, 128kbps AAC, or if it was higher quality (I can't really tell the difference between 256kbps AAC or uncompressed AIFF or WAV).

These headphones weren't cheap, and still aren't, but you can get them for around $100 if you look around. If you really like music, and you're anything like me, you will want to just sit and listen to your favorite albums and not do anything else because you'll be amazed at the sound quality of certain albums.