Mini Review: AKG N60 noise cancelling on-ear headphone

This is not going to be one of our usual, more comprehensive reviews on the sound quality of a high-end headphone. The N60 by AKG is a good $250 dynamic closed-back headphone, but its performance is nothing out of the ordinary sound-wise. In sonic terms, Sony’s MDR-7506 are superior, and you could buy two and a half pairs of Sony headphones for the price of one pair of N60s. But that’s not the point. The point is, for a very specific use, the AKG N60 are perhaps the best damn pair of headphones money can buy at the moment.

Journalists can log a lot of air miles. I’m relatively home-based by some tech journalist standards, but I regularly put somewhere in the region of 30,000-50,000 miles a year in flights. Factor in train journeys, Underground and bus trips into Central London, and time spent in airport lounges, coffee shops in search of WiFi, air con, and caffeine and other noisy environments, and a good set of noise cancelling headphones are a must.

My go-to travel headphones for the last eight or so years have been the Sennheiser PXC 450s circumaural noise cancelling headphones. For good reason: they sound good, they are comfortable, and they work well. A single AAA battery can see you there and back on a transatlantic flight (just), and they do well at drowning out the drone of engines. I’ve tried several other sets of noise cancelling headphones (the PXC 450 are very first generation), but the overall balance of benefits weighed against the rivals. Until now.
 

What the Sennheisers offered was a passive headphone (when the battery ran down), fairly good noise cancellation, and a natural tonal balance that meant they could (at a pinch) be used to monitor interview recordings. What they didn’t bring to the party was a small form factor. The big over-ear design folds down and fits in a pouch, but the pouch itself is fairly large for today’s increasingly lightweight in-cabin baggage.

This is where the AKG N60 closed back on-ear headphones come into their own. They are small – weighing 150g, and they fold up into a soft pouch that’s about the size of that other bastion of in-cabin luggage, a case for a pair of Ray-Bans. You can fit two N60s in their pouches into the case of the PXC 450, though it’s a tight squeeze. They are charged by USB; a three-hour charge gives you 30 hours of cancellation. If and when the battery runs flat, the headphones give you passive music playback. And in their silver on black livery, they are remarkably elegant.

They pass the in-flight test with flying colours in two important respects. First – operational simplicity: a pair of noise cancelling headphones must be easy enough to be operated by someone who has been quasi-lobotomised by spending hours watching crappy movies in a chair (the N60’s one control is a slider on the left ear, and even the headphone cable has a 2mm socket at the headphone end and a 3.5mm socket at the business end, so you can’t even plug the cable in backwards). But more importantly, it aces the noise cancellation test. I mean, really aces the noise cancellation test.

OK, so it was a night flight back from JFK, and I was tired, but sitting in the departure lounge, the background noise was eaten by the N60s. Not just hums and whirrs and the occasional jet noise, but also chatter. With the exception of a small amount of high-frequency component, even human voices were soaked up by the AKG noise abatement society. OK, so the flight back was a Dreamliner, which are legitimately some of the quietest aircraft in the skies, and I was tired, but you could barely hear the engines while taxiing and even take-off was reduced to a mild hum. There were a few tech journalists handed a pair of these headphones on the same flight, who were also just as aware of what noise cancellation can do, and all of them were looking surprised at just how much noise these N60 headphones were eating up.

Fast forward a few days and I took an Underground ‘tube’ journey into Central London. This metro system is efficient, but sometimes old and noisy. Tube trains built in the 1970s and 1980s ferry millions of passengers in and out of the metropolis every day, and they squeal and clatter their way along the tracks. Noise cancellation works fairly well here (especially as London commuters have learned the art of keeping silent in their own space, so there’s little chit-chat) but even here the level of noise reduction from these AKGs was excellent.

The N60 is designed for commuter use, so it’s comfy with smartphone outputs; it is rated at 32 ohm impedance and a relatively high sensitivity of 123dB, but it’s worth noting that, like Sennheiser, AKG measures sensitivity (dB/V) rather than efficiency (dB/mW). European iDevices are limited in output, but the N60 scores well here – the noise cancellation and closed design means you are able to play at lower levels anyway.

Back to the sound quality – precisely how does it fail to live up to the standard set by closed headphones like the Sony MDR-7506 or Sennheiser HD-25? Put simply, it’s in the bass. The N60 has good, deep bass, but doesn’t have the definition and clarity of bottom end of these models. It’s a close run thing, and at 30,000ft, you simply won’t notice. Neither will you notice on a train. You’ll just be more caring that you have less background noise.

For me, this is a fairly big change. I sometimes have to pack the Sennheiser 450s for the flight and a pair of 7506 or HD-25 in the hold for recording at the scene. The AKG N60 offers dual role capabilities in a space half the size of its travel predecessor, with better noise cancellation – much better. And that means I’ll use them on short haul flights, rather than only bringing them on a flight where it’s worth carrying the extra 450 pouch. That’s progress, and is why the N60 comes highly recommended!