Meze Audio Poet Review: Pretty over-ears with a pretty big price

Introduction

Since its inception in 2011, Meze Audio has plenty more hits than misses in its product line-up – and some of its biggest hits have been its fairly expensive, lavishly specified hard-wired planar magnetic headphones.

It’s a formula that demonstrably isn’t broken, so with its latest fairly expensive, hard-wired, open-backed, planar magnetic over-ear headphone design (called Poet), the company doesn’t seem to be trying to fix anything – it’s just expanding its model range a little. So can the Meze Audio lightning strike yet again?

Design

• Magnetically attached earpads
• Hand-braided copper cable with 6.3mm termination
• Weighs 405g

It’s not absolutely true to say “if you’ve seen one pair of expensive Meze Audio over-ear headphones, you’ve seen ‘em all” but it’s not far off. The company has established a little design vocabulary of its own, and it sticks to it.

Which means the Poet features a very broad, very slender suede leather headrest that contacts the wearer’s head beneath a headband that consists of two very fine lengths of titanium alloy. The yokes and hinges are of magnesium, and the rear of the earcups are opened via a quite intricate pattern pressed into steel. The headrest isn’t padded in any way, but the earpads are of memory-foam covered with faux leather – they’re attached magnetically, which makes cleaning them easy, and they don’t absorb and return too much of the wearer’s own body-heat.

They don’t adjust sufficiently to allow the smaller-headed among us to enjoy wearing them, but the Poet are nevertheless comfortable if your head is of appropriate size. The hanger arrangement and the clamping force are judged well, and the 405g weight feels manageable even for longer listens. The ‘friction pole’ adjustment mechanism is a bit agricultural when you consider how expensive these headphones are, mind you.   

The Meze Audio are supplied with a 1.8m length of hand-braided, TPE-covered copper cable with a couple of 3.5mm terminations at the headphones end and a 6.3mm balanced connection at the other. Hands up who thinks a single unbalanced cable option is appropriate for headphones costing almost two grand a pair? No, me neither.

Specification

• Rinaro Isodynamic hybrid array MZ6 ovoid planar magnetic driver
• 4Hz – 96kHz frequency response
• 101dB sensitivity

As with almost every pair of wired over-ear headphones, the driver arrangement is the most significant feature – and as with almost every pair of Meze Audio wired over-ear planar magnetic headphones, the drivers are the result of the indefatigable efforts of Ukraine’s Rinaro Isodynamics.  

Called MZ6, the hybrid driver array fitted to the Poet consists of the Parus diaphragm between a symmetrical array of neodymium magnets that’s positioned in a reinforced polymer housing.

The diaphragm is reasonably compact by Rinaro Isodynamics standards, at ‘just’ 92 x 63mm and 0.06g – but it has an active area of 3507mm² and a dual-driven voice-coil system, so it’s not as if there’s been any scrimping. The upper part of the driver has a ‘switchback’ coil for low-frequency reproduction, and there’s a spiral coil beneath to deal with midrange and high frequencies.

This coil is positioned to sit directly above the listener’s ear canal, which helps minimise any issues that can arise when soundwaves are shorter than the physical width of the earpad they’re trying to escape.

The magnet array is designed to offer uniform activation across the whole surface of the diaphragm. The housing, meanwhile, features Acoustic Metamaterial Tuning System technology in a drive for effective attenuation of high-frequency peaks. MZ6 weighs 73g in total, and has a claimed frequency response of a frankly jaw-dropping 4Hz – 96kHz as well as total harmonic distortion of less than 0.05% across the whole frequency range. Sensitivity is a perfectly manageable 101dB.

Sound Quality

• Smooth and even-handed
• Great powers of detail-retrieval
• Lovely tonal balance

Despite the fact that the 6.3mm cable termination limits connectivity options, there’s an awful lot to enjoy – admire, even – about the way the Meze Audio Poet sound and not all that much to take issue with. If you’re even slightly familiar with the sound of the more expensive headphones in the Meze Audio line-up, nothing about the Poet will startle you – beyond, perhaps, just how direct and even-handed a listen they are.

The tonal balance is very carefully neutral, so the sound you get is the sound of the recording you’re listening to and, maybe, some of the flavour of your source player – the Poet don’t seem to get involved too strongly in this regard. Their frequency response is equally judicious – from the deep, textured and properly controlled low end to the bright, shining and substantial highest frequencies, the Meze Audio are smooth. No part of the frequency range is overlooked or understated, and no part is given undue prominence.

Once through a DS64 file of Pixies’ Here Comes Your Man is sufficient to make the broad point. The Poet incorporate a stack of detail at every turn, and organise a soundstage to the point that there’s plenty of room for every element of the recording to do its thing unhindered by any other.

The bottom end is deep and straight-edged at the attack of bass sounds, so rhythmic expression is strong, and the amount of detail and tonal variation that’s made apparent is very impressive. Modulation into the midrange is as smooth as it gets, and the midrange itself is absolutely loaded with detail both broad and fine – the two voices in this recording are distinct, characterful and utterly positive in the way they communicate. And the brilliance of the treble reproduction is balanced by plenty of body – and again there’s ample detail revealed and carefully contextualised, so the overall picture is convincing.

Downsides are very few, and mild with it. Perhaps the easiest criticism to level at the Meze Audio is that they are dynamic but not wildly so – the upshifts in volume and intensity in recordings is described, but with less confidence than any other aspect of the performance. The Poet, so unequivocal and eloquent in almost every aspect of reproduction, become just slightly diffident when asked to put really big distance between the quietest and the most impassioned moments in a recording. After this, though, any dissent is going to be nit-picking…

Should you buy it?