When i bought my Sansui alpha , i could not stumble on one single bad review.... It Takes me a very long time to read them all... But it was fun...All positive...Simple i order two different Sansui... I never regret it....
But when i read about the AKG K340, i was desesperate... All my other 8 headphones were , now i can say it "crap" or so unnatural ... I decided to go speakers again after having sold Alas! my Tannoy dual gold ( 2 pairs)..
But Speakers also did not satisfy me really, even My Tannoy...I did not know basic acoustic miracles at this time...
Then 5 years ago just before i begin my acoustic experiments journey, i bought the AKG K340...In spite of some negative reviews...Why?
Because i apply my statistical reading analysis and there is more cultist fans of the K340 than people not loving them... The main criticisms were: mismatch between the electret and dynamic cell and contamination between mids and bass...
The very well known Tyll Hertzens said exactly that : mismatch between drivers and boominess...But i read many, many others reviews with more positive reaction and no words about the mismatch and the boominess save few people...
I respect Tyll but i read even the patent of Dr. Gorike the physicist founder of AKG to figure out how this headphone worked... After all it is the most celebrated piece of AKG ... I owned the K701 and it is "unnatural" sound completely... The K701 was celebrated for years...Not by me...
I must say now that almost all headphones for me are not well designed acoustically and i know it by experience and by my experiments with the K340...
I described all this because we must analyse the more reviews possible...but in the headphone case reviews are misleading, because very, very few headphones are good acoustically... Most people dont even know why...They never listen to a really good headphone with a speaker like holographic sound , ethereal highs, and baqs that shake my body as with subs...
Now why Tyll, an expert reviewer of headphones miss the K340 ?
Because like most reviewers he does not created a system around them to serve them , he reviewed them , one after the other, right out of the box without even knowing and learning how to use this complex headphone peculiarities... And he does not realized that the only hybrid ever designed with success and generating cultish love for 40 years need to be LEARNED before being evaluated ... And he did not realized because he never listen to an hybrid that the sound impression will be completely different...The brain must take notice of it... We must learn how to listen a new product, especially a verty complex headphone...Hard to drive and impossible to optimize if we dont understand why this resonators inside are there and what is this dual chamber inside etc... It takes me 6 months to eliminate the boominess and the supposed mismatch which i perceived the first day as Tyll described....... i put 6 modifications...And this diamond shine now astonishingly...For example i opened it and put two types of vibration control materials , i tried 5 pads...i discover the good one with the right dimension...i cut off the thick plastic grid inside that protect the driver ( AKG put it to protect the product not for S.Q. at all ) Etc...
Now this lesson was for me : never trust any SINGLE reviewer.... Trust a large numbers who will reveal in their own way if we analyse their language for each acoustic factor what the product can do...
I read a review by another expert in Israel by the way, a very serious dude, expert in headphone optimization, who transformed and optimizeed the K340 ... He give to them almost a maximal note of excellence... This compensated for the negative Tyll review in my mind and convince me after the lost of my speakers/room that i can also myself put the K340 to his top level ...( it take me 6 months each day of listening experiments in my 10 months absence from audiogon)
No reviewer even very competent one own the truth by himself alone ... We must analyse many reviews...
