It’s been a couple of good months for adding to my headphone collection. The most recent acquisition is a pair of Meze 99 Classics from Picasso Pawn. The markdown wasn’t quite in my normal range, but it was fair, with all sales final. These sound great and have a very balanced output, with boosts where I like them, and they are very clear with good separation. The only problem noted is that one ear cup has a short that I can ignore for the most part unless something bumps the connector on that cup and the sound momentarily drops from that cup. I swapped the L & R cables, and it followed the cup, not the cable. So, I am in contact with Meze to see if they will sell me a part without making me send them to the U.S. repair center. If that doesn’t work out, I may just run a female 3.5mm connector from the driver out the hole and live with it. Update: 7May2025 – Meze was easy to deal with via their support email address and offered a replacement driver with with little board attached that contains the 3.5mm female jack. Installation was super simple with a couple of screws on the board and another four holding the dynamic driver into the cup. What’s interesting is, while my payment was made to Meze directly, the actual driver assembly shipped from a warehouse near Chicago via Amazon and had Amazon barcode on the packaging. A quick search located the part on Amazon for a few dollars more than what I paid but included free shipping with Prime. But the Meze price still ended up cheaper even with shipping added.
Additional headphones added include a couple of Sony models. One is the newer MDR-MV1, and it’s interesting from the perspective that it is an open-back from Sony. I got a decent deal on it from a used seller on Amazon with a risky rating in the 80% range, but the description was “like new open box,” and that appears to be the case. The seller (PC Arsenal) made the effort to wrap the stock box with a layer of thick, heavy cardboard to protect the corners during shipping. As far as my initial impressions of sound go, these are marketed for mixing spatial audio, so the separation is very good, and the tone is good across the board. The cups are aluminum or some sort of alloy, and the rest of the materials are super lightweight as well. I don’t have any issues wearing them for several hours. The cable screws into the left cup, but I found a standard 3.5mm male to 3.5mm male cable works without issue to get something shorter or longer than the stock cable.
The other Sony is the well-regarded model MDR-7506 that I picked up at a different Picasso Pawn for $30 in like-new condition. Compared to the other two Sony models I have, the Z7M2 and MV1, I can tell the frequency range is not the same, but these still sound great for casual listening. They are a little heavier than the MV1, and I replaced the stock pads to get something a little larger and thicker. I don’t think it impacted the sound signature on these. Tuning is a little v-shaped to me, and that is right along with my personal preferences.
Tonight I have spent about an hour trying each Sony set and doing a manual EQ with eqMac, starting with a 10-band PEQ and adding a Low Shelf and High Shelf, with a goal of creating a 12-band PEQ profile that only slightly impacts the sound signature for each one to the point where I could disable EQ and the only change is a loss of the correction I made on some high-end treble that has a little too much sizzle. I get where people want to EQ for their preferred sound signature, but to me that’s cheating myself out of experiencing the headphone designer’s intended sound signature, which is why I am trying to keep that signature with only corrections for something that’s way off. For the Z7M2, that seems to be the high end sizzle and I initially used the high shelf to bring down the highs about 2.0 dB across 5 octaves from 20,000 Hz, but that was adjusted to be about a 1db increase over the course of the listening session and only slight adjustments in the PEQ ranges until I get to the low shelf where there is only a slight boost. With 70mm drivers, the Z7M2 can make you feel like you are at the club standing too close to a subwoofer, with a false feeling of chest air movement — not to mention giving your eardrums a workout. The others, MV1 and 7506, were much tamer in the high end and only minimal EQ was needed for me. For the tuning session, the headphones were connected to my S.M.S.L. SP200 (discontinued), which is getting the signal from my Topping DX3+ Pro DAC, connected to my MacBook Pro via USB, and listening to either FLAC or Amazon Music, with some of that being tagged as Ultra HD.
And I almost forgot the new Drop + grell OAE1 headphones that I ordered from Drop while it was still pre-order pricing. If you are not familiar with these or the designer, Axel Grell was behind many of the Sennheiser headphones that set the bar for neutral sound with a great sound stage for open back headphones. I think his hands were on pretty much all of the Sennheisers from HD600 through the 660S including the HD58x, HD650 and HD6xx. I guess with the Sennheiser management team out of the way with his new Grell endeavor, he felt empowered to experiment with moving a 40mm driver from the traditional position of being parallel to the side of the listener’s head to a position where the driver is mounted on the front inner edge of the ear cup so it faces the ear as if it were speaker slightly off to an angle for each ear. These are open back and when I listened to them for the first time, I expected to hear something different as all of the reviewers and Grell himself was laying the groundwork before these were released to not be turned off by the directional sound source, but my experience has been these are great sounding headphones with large cups regardless of the driver placement. To remind myself of the sound signature of these since they made it out of the rotation tonight for the Sony EQ session, I did hear a difference when I put them on just now going from the MDR-Z7M2. When I first put them on, I was like did I lose connectivity to the S.M.S.L. and now I am hearing the sound from the MacBook speakers?? No, after turning up the
volume a little the sound was indeed coming from the OAE1 and they did have me guessing if it was a speaker or the headphone like I said. The headband makes a hot spot and I find the clamp pressure pretty tight and the slider for the cups is still a bit stiff when I adjust them, but once I get it set they are fairly comfortable and I imagine both of those latter traits will improve over time. I don’t find that I need much EQ at all on them and don’t like the EQ settings I obtained from either Squig.link Auto-EQ or using the built-in eqMac headphone lookup tools to get an EQ based on many of the same measurements that are up on Squig.link. Right now, the Sony MDR-7506 EQ is sounding great on the OAE1 and disabling EQ doesn’t make any real difference on what I hear other than a slight sub-bass boost is lost with the EQ off.
Thanks for reading, and I hope this has been informative. EQ settings are below and I am working on a python script that will extract these from eqMac data (macOS) as a means to backup my PEQ setings and more easily share versus the manual process of clicking the pencil and using copy/paste.
SONY MDR-7506
Preamp: -1.97 dB
Filter 1: ON LS Fc 20 Hz Gain 1.99 dB Q 0.18
Filter 2: ON PK Fc 32 Hz Gain 0.62 dB Q 0.8
Filter 3: ON PK Fc 64 Hz Gain 1.3 dB Q 1.41
Filter 4: ON PK Fc 125 Hz Gain 0.27 dB Q 1.41
Filter 5: ON PK Fc 250 Hz Gain 0 dB Q 1.41
Filter 6: ON PK Fc 500 Hz Gain 0.96 dB Q 1.41
Filter 7: ON PK Fc 1000 Hz Gain 1.64 dB Q 1.41
Filter 8: ON PK Fc 2000 Hz Gain 0 dB Q 1.41
Filter 9: ON PK Fc 4000 Hz Gain 0.27 dB Q 1.41
Filter 10: ON PK Fc 8000 Hz Gain 0 dB Q 1.41
Filter 11: ON HS Fc 16000 Hz Gain -0.41 dB Q 0.18
Filter 12: ON PK Fc 16000 Hz Gain 1.99 dB Q 1.41
SONY MDR-Z7M2
Preamp: -3.12 dB
Filter 1: ON LS Fc 20 Hz Gain 1.99 dB Q 0.18
Filter 2: ON PK Fc 32 Hz Gain 1.99 dB Q 0.8
Filter 3: ON PK Fc 64 Hz Gain 1.99 dB Q 1.41
Filter 4: ON PK Fc 125 Hz Gain 0.27 dB Q 1.41
Filter 5: ON PK Fc 250 Hz Gain 0 dB Q 1.41
Filter 6: ON PK Fc 500 Hz Gain 0.27 dB Q 1.41
Filter 7: ON PK Fc 1000 Hz Gain 0.27 dB Q 1.41
Filter 8: ON PK Fc 2000 Hz Gain 1.99 dB Q 1.41
Filter 9: ON PK Fc 4000 Hz Gain -1 dB Q 1.41
Filter 10: ON PK Fc 8000 Hz Gain 0.96 dB Q 1.41
Filter 11: ON HS Fc 16000 Hz Gain -1.78 dB Q 0.18
Filter 12: ON PK Fc 16000 Hz Gain 0 dB Q 1.41
SONY MDR-MV1
Preamp: -1.97 dB
Filter 1: ON LS Fc 20 Hz Gain 4.39 dB Q 0.18
Filter 2: ON PK Fc 32 Hz Gain 2.33 dB Q 0.8
Filter 3: ON PK Fc 64 Hz Gain 2.67 dB Q 1.41
Filter 4: ON PK Fc 125 Hz Gain 3.02 dB Q 1.41
Filter 5: ON PK Fc 250 Hz Gain 1.64 dB Q 1.41
Filter 6: ON PK Fc 500 Hz Gain 0.62 dB Q 1.41
Filter 7: ON PK Fc 1000 Hz Gain 3.02 dB Q 1.41
Filter 8: ON PK Fc 2000 Hz Gain 3.02 dB Q 1.41
Filter 9: ON PK Fc 4000 Hz Gain 1.99 dB Q 1.41
Filter 10: ON PK Fc 8000 Hz Gain 3.02 dB Q 1.41
Filter 11: ON HS Fc 16000 Hz Gain 3.02 dB Q 0.18
Filter 12: ON PK Fc 16000 Hz Gain 3.7 dB Q 1.41