AKG 240M
A headphone that studios treated less like a product and more like furniture — the pair already sitting on the console when the session started.
Overview
The AKG 240M has one of the strangest paper trails in the AKG catalog: it shows up constantly, but almost never as the subject. It appears as line items in equipment inventories, as a promotional giveaway, and — most tellingly — as the benchmark that AKG itself invoked when it launched its successors. That's not the record of a hyped product. It's the record of a headphone that became infrastructure.
The clearest evidence of how deeply the 240M embedded itself in working studios comes from a broadcaster's equipment list, where the AKG 240M headphones sit alongside a Shure SM7b, a Mackie 1604, a Tascam CD-RW2000, a Technics SL1200MKII, and a Rane HC6 headphone amp. That's a room built for daily production work, not a hi-fi shrine, and the 240M was simply part of the kit — the same way the SM7b was just part of the mic locker.
The second piece of evidence is stranger and more revealing. In a period classified ad from a recording-equipment dealer, the AKG 240M appears as a freebie — thrown in with the purchase of an Aphex 612 dual gate or an Aphex 300 Stereo Compellor. A headphone given away to move outboard gear is a headphone the dealer has in quantity and considers a safe, uncontroversial sweetener. Nobody bundles a product that generates complaints.
What the 240M's actual specifications were — impedance, driver type, frequency response, weight — is not documented in the surviving material consulted here. That absence is worth stating plainly rather than papering over with numbers borrowed from the later K240 Studio or from general knowledge of the K240 line. The 240M is a distinct model, and its specs should not be inferred from its descendants. What can be said with confidence is narrower but more useful: it was an AKG headphone, it was widely deployed in professional audio environments, and it was regarded highly enough that AKG used it as the reference point for an entire later generation.
That reference point is where the 240M's reputation gets stated outright. When AKG introduced the K 240 Studio and K 141 Studio, the company's advertising copy — run in EQ (March 2002, p.67) and again in EQ (May 2002, p.73) — opened by declaring that "AKG's K240M and K141M headphones are industry standards." That's marketing, and marketing is not a verdict. But it's the manufacturer's own marketing, and it's telling that AKG chose to sell its new model by invoking the 240M by name rather than quietly retiring it. The same ad copy framed the new Studio version around a larger transducer, a 55-ohm impedance for greater loudness, and a plug-in cable for easier service — all of which implicitly describe what the older 240M was not.
For anyone chasing one today, the practical picture is the usual one for a long-serving studio headphone. The 240M was built to be used hard and replaced without drama, which means surviving examples range from cosmetically rough but functional to carefully kept. That's a quieter kind of desirability, and it's the kind the 240M actually earned.
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