Introduction

The Romania-based Meze Audio brand has made its mark before on TechPowerUp with its popular Meze 99 Neo closed-back dynamic driver headphones, and in a way through our quick look at Dekoni replacement ear pads, which more or less addressed my main issues with those headphones. Meze Audio has always been at the forefront of making headphones look great with excellent build quality, and its higher-end offerings have gone the planar driver route with a fairly unique driver configuration in partnership with Ukraine-based Rinaro Isodynamics. These are the flagship-class Meze Empyrean and Elite open-back headphones, so when the company announced a portable, closed-back take on the same I was quite intrigued.


The Meze Liric (also referred to as LIRIC inconsistently even by Meze itself) is clearly inspired by the same design language as recent Meze releases, including with the adoption of premium materials—magnesium skeleton in this case—and a classy black base with copper accents. While one of the more expensive headphones on the market today, it remains the least expensive route to experience the Meze and Rinaro collaboration in its fascinating dual voice coil planar magnetic driver design. The image above shows the two items that made their way to me for a 2-week period courtesy a loaner program arranged on Head-Fi, which did mean I had to rush my testing more than I'd like. The second item is a Meze upgrade cable using a 4.4 mm balanced connector, which adds to the portability even more when paired with portable DAC/amps. This will be a long review covering all these points in detail, and we begin with a look at the product specifications in the table below.

Specifications