Meze Classics 99 - Impressions and Measurements

Ireally like these as my office headphones. I did not find the bass as much as you did though, but I wear glasses so this controlled leak probably makes them indeed sound more neutral, although that bass still gets noticed. They are also considerably more comfortable with the bigger pads. I was really quite surprised at how fast these sound compared to a Fostex T50RP I had had in for demo purposes.
Did you have time to dampen those drivers at all? I would wait for the warranty to expire before trying some stuffing in the cups. Hopefully someone more brave than I will try it first...

 

I had issues with the clamping as well, stretching didn't seem to help, I kept them on a ball for a few days, no change. I received a email from Meze offering to loosen the tension, so I took them up on it. Will see what they feel like when they come back.

In regards to bass, definitely strong but not crazy. Interesting that you found them extremely bassy. It is possible my seal was never ideal. Either way, these are great sounding headphones IMO.

 

Thanks Hans. This is the exact sort of post that gives a manufacturer a to-do list for V2.

 

I listened to these via the loaner tour using a Mac Mini/Audirvana + -> Yggdrasil -> MicroZOTL 2 w/ LPS. At first I thought they were kinda boring and that the bass quantity was not as great as the TH-X00 PH. Later it seemed like they played a little deeper but the TH-X00 had more of a bump in the lower mid-bass/ upper bass which is why the first listen was a little deceptive.

I thought they were pretty smooth but a little muted compared to the TH-X00. There was nothing really offensive about the sound and had they been a little more comfortable I may have given them a longer listen. Despite the bigger earcups vs. the earlier version, they were still on the border of being a little small for me.

 

@Hands , how do you feel these stand compared to the Oppo PM3?

 

Ok, since I have the Meze allready probably not point to look at the Oppo then. Pricing here in europe favours the Meze anyway.

 

Just found this thread and thought I would comment since I've owned a pair of 99 Classics for several weeks now. For the $225 that I paid (I bought them very gently used from a Head-fi member) I like them very, very much. They seem to work well on my iPod, iPad, directly out from my PC AND my Fostex HP-A4BL DAC/amp. Bonus points for the robust carrying case and completely detachable pair of cables which makes travelling with them quite easy.

In terms of the sound, the bass is my favorite part although they also do a great job on anything with generous amounts of guitar fuzz and distortion (think Ted Nugent - Stranglehold). I find them punchy and visceral and that is both a plus and a minus. They are fun and engaging for an album or two's worth of listening but after that I start to get fatigued and need a break. Easy listening is not the name of the game for the 99 Classics, at least for me. Again, for what I paid for them I am satisfied. As is they aren't "everyday" headphones for me (I have MA900's for that) but they are a great change of pace and extremely well built for the asking price.

 

Absolutely. I did not purchase a pair after having the loaner but the build quality and aesthetics are phenomenal. I truly wish Meze great success. They did not make a bad headphone by any means. I hope they put out a great successor that I can purchase with fewer reservations for myself or my wife.

 

The 99 Classics are indeed a great effort from Meze and pretty close to being unconditionally good. My honest opinion is that even with the niggles they remain a strong value in comparison to other headphones in their price range. In fact I am struggling to think of another headphone that has the look, the build quality, the accessories and the sound quality of the Meze at or near the same price point (maybe the PM3 at $400 is the closest?). That's what impresses me most and makes me look forward to whatever Meze might be doing next.

 

Adding impressions of how Brainwavz Angled Sheepskin and Microsuede pads play with the Meze 99 Classics's sound, providing impressions of stock form too for context. Some squiggles will follow. Please note that I screwed up in REW and lost all but one measurement set for the original pads from September 2019. I could not take measurements again because these pads began crumbling last year but it wasn't until recently that I bothered trying to replace them. FR for the two other pads are single-channel averages of 5 placements with CSDs and distortion figures taken from representative (i.e. less noisy outside than usual) samples. Tentative flat = neutral compensation.

DISCLAIMER these headphones were sent to me by Meze about two years back? I was under the assumption that this would be a loaner unit and that I'd be paying to ship it back to Romania at a later date when I accepted the offer but as it turns out they said I could keep the silly thing (after it got lost in the postal system for a few months). Because I felt really bad about that I felt the right thing to do would be to give them copy approval for my impressions. These impressions were not flattering so they asked me, nicely, not to share them.

So I didn't, and I still feel like a moron for asking in the first place. Since it's necessary in this case however I'm going to speak briefly on stock sound and base pad comparisons off those. All impressions formed using my phone and a Schiit Fulla 2 functioning as an AIO because... that's legit just what I have right now.

P.S.
Please don't read too much into CSD and distortion plots— they're valid datapoints but the MiniDSP EARS rig can only do so much IMO. Measurements matched by running full-range pink noise and targeting 85dBA. 4.5kHz ringing in CSD is the EARS rig being odd.

STOCK PADS (single measurement)

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Spoiler: these are old measurements and I don't particularly trust them, especially distortion

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Bass comes across as prodigiously bloated and hits like a brick, not necessarily in a pleasant way. Could be the headphones' tight seal but it's generally just more fatiguing in the low end than either the Klipsch Heritage HP-3 or the Massdrop/Fostex TH-X00 Ebony. I actually gave these to my one sister but she ended up hating full-sized headphones and stuck with her AirPods. I lent them around before they went back into storage (this was pre-pandemic).

There was a lower treble bump that was hell on my ears on some tracks, but that shifted around some with position— it was tolerable on most material but never really went away, gave the impression of "harder" overtones and too-present hi hats. Worse was the upper midrange recession that, while adding decent headstage depth, just made everything sound murky and muffled— I had these mentally listed as a less-technically-competent Audioquest Nighthawk, which just about made sense save for the more-present ~6kHz hardness (which actually reminds me a bit of the Campfire Cascade based on an extensive demo). Transients and dynamic range were decent even with the bass muddying things up and bleeding into the background of most material. They were less mud with the seal partially broken via thin glasses frame but I still couldn't jive with their overall profile.


ANGLED SHEEPSKIN (avg 5 placements)

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Before the stock pads began turning into sticky gunk I played around with positioning and found that toeing the drivers inwards helped fill in the upper midrange void, giving backs some much-needed crunch to the presentation. Based on that I thought it'd be worth buying the angled sheepskin (angled because upper mids, sheepskin because PU leather never really lasts long with me) despite it being one of the more expensive pads on offer, sale or no.

That turned out to be a poor decision.

That 8.5kHz ridge is there and it is audible in the form of sporadic treble hashiness, though the even massive-r bass boost goes a long way towards masking it. The overall profile is that of a Meze 99 turned up to 11 with the treble going from hard and stabby to splashy and fatiguing over long listening sessions. I don't generally mind a bass boost but it just sounds flubby and blurred.

Headstage is thrown pretty far forward, noticeably further than with stock pads, but the bass boomboom intrudes on that stage and makes everything come across as untextured down low. There's a grammopone-esque, nasally quality to vocals now; listening to Sinatra CDs I ripped from my grandpa is pure honk central, and higher vocals just get a far more forward placement. Breath intake on some recordings are oddly pronounced. Fun pop rock like Paramore's Part II on the other hand has insanely thin vocals, sounds like a really bad nightclub set. The perky, upbeat intro vocals on Rose Colored Boy are fine but main verse gets buried in muck again. With something like The Killers's Mr. Brightside the treble is overall more significantly fatiguing on the Klipsch HP-3 but vocal sibilance specifically is more unpleasant on the Meze 99s with these pads.

Material like Radiohead's 2+2=5 has very pronounced sibilance and is a chore to listen to on these. The drum intro to Led Zeppelin's When the Levee Breaks just sounds like thin, flappy ass, which is unforgivable to me. Nuances in the recording are more or less preserved from original pads but the obscene voicing kills trailing decays early, which is odd to hear because the excellent seal the pads offer give a great sense of room, the isolation pushing miscellaneous fragments of sound like fingers sliding on guitar strings at the intro of Daft Punk's Fragments of Time to the forefront.

Blackground is... nominally clear, but the pervasive rumble and sometimes-muted, sometimes-intrusive treble just ruins that. Despite the headstage size there's not much sense of breath and air, it's pretty murky (but no worse than on stock pads, from memory). Tracks with an excess of air as typical of J-Pop (e.g. Kalafina - Oblivious) are still pretty much, though.


MICROSUEDE (avg 5 placements)

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Unfortunately, I don't own these pads. They belong to someone I dragged into getting stuff during the Brainwavz sale because I'm cheap and wanted to take advantage of the free shipping they offer on larger orders. I say this is unfortunate because these actually make me like the Meze 99s and I have already failed negotiations with their owner to trade in my Angled Sheepskin pads for them, haha.

The low end is less present compared to either of the above, but there's grunt and rumble when need be even if it's unfocused-sounding. It just sounds "dirtier", but this is honestly more my jam than the "brick upside the head" feeling I got with the original pads. It's just about on par with the angled sheepskin for texture, though I think the bottom-end is snappier feeling by comparison— busier passages like on RCHP's Breaking the Girl or Nightwish's Shudder Before the Beautiful are less congested v stock or angled sheepskin.

Headspace opens up and there's a great sense of clarity to the presentation, enough so that I'm actually thinking this does headstage better than the TH-X00EB which had somewhat "shrunken" sonic images at times; the Meze 99 with microsuede has properly-sized performers present with deeper stage placement even on fairly claustrophobic-feeling cuts, e.g. Heilung's Krigsgaldr.

Despite measurements (or it could just be I haven't "lucked" into a song that triggers it yet) the very not-subtle 8.5kHz spike wasn't as bothersome to me as it was on the Angled Sheepskin pads. There was an occasional harshness to vocal sibilance (Florence + the Machine, Breaking Down) or cymbal crashes (Paul Simon, Under African Skies) but it was much muted relative to either other pad set. The FR does a good enough job describing how I think of this: a pronounced downward-sloped W-shape. Even stuff like Of Walking Abortion off Manic Street Preachers's The Holy Bible failed to come across as fatiguing despite how it usually goes with tizzy headphones. Sense of air was better than on angled sheepskin, but it loses out to the HP-3 and X00 Ebony (which, to be fair, are both pricier headphones, inasmuch as price isn't always indicative of performance).


Stock faux leather, microsuede, and angled sheepskin FRs compared:

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The 99 neo, quite an interesting headphone. Offering a bit of the woody sound to the masses. Normally it would have this bass shelf that would engulf most of the lower mid range. Not to say that is a bad thing, but I was looking for a slightly more balanced sound for my personal music. As Reference I listen to mostly Jazz,Psych and Progrock

So where does that leave me. Well since I had some experience opening these. I decided maybe I could open them up a 2nd time. And with speaking to Tommy, and Ev. I decided what the heck. time to chop some old pads up and stick them in.

Really gotta give it to them, the lathe marks are awesome to look at. Maybe i'll treat the wood cups in the future, an idea @k4rstar has been kicking around with me for a while.

For the mod. It was quite simple, you remove the pad. Use a 0.9 hex bit, and remove the 4 screws.
inside you will find the black dampening material(foam). Remove it from the enclosure and trace it. No need to be precise here.

As you can see I cut my own foam pad in this case the Yaxi Grado pad in purple(The color fads with use, I suggest the black for a Grado but it wont fit each Grado I suggest the screw mod instead(https://www.superbestaudiofriends.org/index.php?threads/grado-screw-mod.10500/))

Now I would say this new dampening material has a higher density, and much thicker than stock, I would suspect it is near 4x the density when considering the thickness.

Now for the sound. I would say we have a reduced the bass shelf to a more preferable level. Also something about closed backs that I really enjoy, my perceived level of detail is increased, could be due to the reduced noise pollution, other notable headphones are esx900, and Yamaha Orthos
Now it still isn't perfect but it was simple and easy for me. Try it out if you have a set of foam pads laying around and a 99 c/n, curious what someone with a measurement rig is able to achieve.