AKG K830 BT Wireless Headphone

Visited the JBL Concept Store at the Bonifacio High Street earlier this week upon the invitation of their rep who showed me a new line they’ve recently introduced in the Philippines — the AKG Personal Audio collection.

Frankly, I am not very familiar with AKG and this is the very first time I’ve seen their products (mostly microphones and headphones). The local distributor only got the permission to release the AKG line just this January.

I also learned that AKG was actually bought by Harman since 1994 and they’ve been in the audio business for over 60 years.

One of the items they demoed to me and eventually lent out was this AKG K830 BT which is a wireless Bluetooth headphone. The headphone can be paired with your iPod, iPhone or any other music player or mobile phone that has built-in Bluetooth.

Device pairing is pretty easy and simple — just press the button in one of the headphones for 8 seconds and it will show upon your media player or phone and ready to be paired. Pressing it another 8 seconds will also turn off the power of the headphone.

One pretty nifty feature of the AKG K830 is the embedded microphone hidden in one of the earcups. That allows you to make and receive calls when paired with a mobile phone — just press the receive button and you’re talking hands-free in an instant.

Audio quality is impressive, IMO. Sound is pretty sharp and crisp even at significant distance from the streaming device. Bass is good but not that very emphasized though you can feel the omph when the music calls for it. Volume control is also found in one of the ear cups. I reckon you can do as much as 10 meters between the headphone and the music player and still get good sound quality with minimal attenuation (the Bluetooth transmits over a 2.4GHz radio link using the Kleer technology).

Tried the built-in microphone and got good reception despite it’s odd position in the headphone. Had some problems with my iPhone 4’s Voice Control — was having a hard time making the device correctly recognize my voice commands.

The AKG K830 is a neat, light-weight and portable headphone with good audio performance both for streaming music and handsfree phone use. Just could not figure out how they priced this at Php12,990USD 221INR 18,765EUR 211CNY 1,612 which, IMO, a bit on the expensive end.