About this collection
Meze Audio started in 2009 when Antonio Meze, an industrial designer, wanted headphones he'd feel about the way he felt about his Fender Stratocaster: not another piece of plastic tech, but something with real presence. He began experimenting with off-the-shelf parts and eventually started shaping speaker cups out of wood instead of the injection-molded plastic that dominated the category, working out of Baia Mare, Romania, where the company is still based today.
The breakthrough came in 2015 with the 99 Classics, funded on Indiegogo and developed entirely in-house, the first Meze product built from the ground up rather than assembled from existing parts. Its wood-cup closed-back design and warm, musical tuning built the brand's reputation, and the 99 (now joined by the 105 and 109) remains one of the most recognizable silhouettes in the headphone world. Alongside those and the Alba IEM, they're consistently among our best-selling Meze products, the entry point that gets people into the brand before they work their way up.
At the top of the range, Meze has pushed into genuine flagship territory. Working with Ukrainian driver specialist Rinaro Isodynamics, the company developed an isodynamic hybrid-array planar magnetic driver used in the Empyrean, Empyrean II, Elite, and Poet, headphones built around a big, open, effortless soundstage and detail retrieval that put Meze in direct conversation with established planar names like Audeze and HiFiMAN.
What ties the range together, from the Alba to the Elite, is the industrial design sensibility Meze started with: real wood, machined metal, modular and user-serviceable cables and parts, and a look that reads as considered rather than mass-produced.