AK GN 40 dali katch

here’s a super-comfy, super-sounding set of headphones with neat interchangeabl e filt ers

Luxury earphones and a designer Bluetooth speaker, reviewed by us.

£ 349.99, uk.akg.com

With the N40 in-ears, AKG has focused as much on innovation as it has on great sound quality. But before we get onto the interesting features of these headphones, let’s focus a little on what really matters – sound and comfort. And for £350, you aren’t going to find much better than these. You’ll need a good source to get the most out of them, of course, but listening to them with an Onkyo DP-X1 (yes, we tried out Hotel California in 24-bit), they’re sonically superb. Hugely enjoyable to listen to, in fact, with clear highs and warm lows. Stick them in a Chord Mojo attached to your phone and they’re equally impressive. And to top it all, they’re really comfy – by which we mean really comfy.

In fact, everything about the N40s screams quality – right down to the packaging and accessories thrown in (you get a couple of cables, a flight adaptor, a cleaning tool, four pairs of sleeves and a lovely pouch in the box).

As well as this, AKG has enabled listeners to customise the sound to suit their source or listening preference. This is achieved via three ‘tuning filters’ – essentially, unscrewable (and tiny) filters that attach to the earphones to give more bass or more treble if and when they’re needed. Factory-installed are the ‘reference’ filters that produce neutral sound, but if you want things to be a bit bassier, you just attach the bass-boost filter.

Some might argue that this is a gimmick – buy a pair of bass headphones if you want that sound, and so on – but we like it. It’s a great approach and one we’re sure you’ll love as much as we do – especially if you like tweaking your audio to suit different albums and tracks.