AKG's Demise

AKG, a headphone and microphone manufacturing company established in 1947, primarily making speakers for cinemas. As time passed, a number of breakthroughs were achieved, including the production of the worlds first dynamic cardioid microphone, the AKG D12 in 1953. After expanding into headphones, mainly for studio reference uses, they were acquired by Harman International Industries in 1994, which in turn would become another one of Samsung's subsidiary companies. After making a name in the world of critical listening headphones, with their open back K models of headphones, such as the K612 pro (Pictured Below)

and the newer K712 pro, it is clear that AKG had some excellent engineers in their team, based in Vienna. Unfortunately, their success was not as well appreciated by Samsung, which meant that even after winning a Technical Grammy Award for their headphones in 2010, the company was slowly being sapped of their resources, as 6 years after their Grammy presentation, the original engineering facility in Vienna was closed down and operations were to continue in California, with all of the manufacturing processes outsourced to either China or within Samsung's own factories in South Korea. Now that operations for AKG have effectively seized, a few former engineers banded together to create a competing company, Austrian Audio. AKG is sadly now only ever brought up whenever Samsung creates a new pair of wireless headphones, as they own all aspects of the shell that once was AKG.