Much of my current work is at a United Nations specialized agency which requires our meetings be translated into several languages.  The headphones they provide are these dandy torture devices, the AKG K10/2.  The conference room we are meeting in today has places for about 150 delegates, each one sporting a K10.  This is one of the smaller meeting spaces... so they've got plenty of these things in service here, I would guess somewhere on the order of 700 or so.
http://www.akg.com/site/products/powerslave,id,326,pid,326,nodeid,2,_language,EN.html


They are actually a very interesting headphone as they are completely functional and well suited for this service.  They are a mono, supra aural headphone.  Looking around the room they fit nearly every head.  They are easy to clean and super durable.  Out of curiosity during a break I hooked them up to a my portable (MK II/CLAS/iPod) rig.  No surprise, it sounded like music played through the telephone, really.  But for listening to delegates speaking in the room through the Philips a/v system they do a very respectable job reproducing the spoken work.  If it wasn't for the pain they eventually cause on my ears I might use them all day instead of plugging in my IEM's.

I'm impressed with a purpose built piece of gear like this.  And being a headphone geek this sort of thing interest me...

It's also interesting to see what other folks are substituting for the AKG.  Here are a few random observations:
- The Japanese delegates seem to have the most interesting (and high quality) IEM collection, and the only other group I've seen with custom IEM's.
- If I had to guess I think the most popular substitute is the Koss Portapro, I see quite a few here.  Great to see folks picking a practical portable.
- I keep waiting for it, but no one that I've seen have broken out some beats to listen to boring UN speeches!
- Plenty of ubiquitous white buds, of course.
- Most of the delegates are traveling to get here, so no surprise that buds and IEMs dominate the substitutions.