About old
What it is that discards the superfluous, the gimmicky, the flashy, the questionable, the overly fragile, the misplaced?
The obvious answer would be time. And this is also the riddle of good design: very few objects achieve such a rarefied consistency of qualities.
This is our aim, the antifragility of classics.
Quality Standards
We build high-end headphones, so we obsess with sound quality.
But the presence can easily be broken if anything else is even slightly neglected. The choice of materials, the precision of craftsmanship, the reliability are - have to be - equally important.
Whenever possible, we try to make parts easily replaceable.
All of these to ensure that a feeling of trust will accompany your every interaction with a Meze.
Development process
Every pair undergoes a meticulous development period where every possible aspect is refined. We prepare for long shelf lives. Usually, the iterations of a design are sold as different generations; we prefer to go through as many trials as humanly possible without having our customers as testers. We want them to own a finished product.
You cannot hope to achieve a timeless design, but still think in terms of the usual “upgrade cycle”.
History
Meze Audio was founded in 2009. We started small, acquiring experience by experimenting with parts already on the market, searching for the right materials and the best sound.
Our breakthrough year was 2015, after the very well received Indiegogo campaign for the 99 Classics, a pair conceived from scratch over long years of hard work. The 99 keeps receiving awards and nominations that are beyond anything we could have hoped for.
Today all our models, headphones or earphones, are designed in-house, and in the spirit of the no-compromise vision that was there to begin with.
Values
Our aim is to make representative, future reference products. We are developing our own aesthetic language, a lateral step from the minimal mainstream of today. We don’t shy to show structural components or to rework exposed mechanical ones. Originality must always be a by-product of high functionality; style, an aftereffect of ergonomics.
The destination of all our efforts is to make classics of the genre.
As classics have to outlive seasonal fashions, we design for longer product generations.
We also design for long listening sessions. The sound signature tells the same story as the mechanics, as the visual flair: clarity without harshness, freshness without fatigue.
People
Antonio Meze is a product designer with worldwide experience. We, the Meze team, are engineers and designers and musicians and artists. Headphones are the intersection, the common ground where everybody's interests meet. And we develop each pair as if making it for ourselves. We are fortunate: our work is our passion, really.