WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:04.960 You know, there's a lot of premium headphones out there that aren't really made of what I think are premium materials. 00:00:04.960 --> 00:00:08.680 A lot of plastic, a lot of like, you know, aluminum, nothing special. 00:00:08.680 --> 00:00:13.760 But what makes these Metses headphones so G-Dang cool to me 00:00:13.760 --> 00:00:17.680 is that they're made of actual wood. Let's just look at that. 00:00:17.680 --> 00:00:21.480 Just, just, it's so beautiful. It's so nice. 00:00:21.480 --> 00:00:24.600 Romanian audio legends Mese have sponsored us today 00:00:24.600 --> 00:00:28.200 to talk about their 99 classics. And some of you in the headphone world, 00:00:28.200 --> 00:00:33.920 you might be thinking, Hey, I'm Seba. And you're right. These aren't exactly new, but that isn't a bad thing. 00:00:33.920 --> 00:00:37.720 Good sound stays good for life. But Mese audio has a pretty good reputation 00:00:37.720 --> 00:00:42.920 for making high quality headphones. Their 99 classics sit far more in their mainstream line 00:00:42.920 --> 00:00:46.280 than some of their really, really high-end things like their Imperian headphones, 00:00:46.280 --> 00:00:50.840 which I think can cost quite a pretty penny. So these can be like a great introduction 00:00:50.840 --> 00:00:55.680 if you're somebody who's interested in getting into more of the hobbyist headphone space and want something that's gonna look classy 00:00:55.680 --> 00:01:00.240 and also like quite a firm case. You can really, too much. 00:01:00.240 --> 00:01:05.200 These are a traditional wired headphone. There's no batteries. There's no wireless or Bluetooth connections. 00:01:05.200 --> 00:01:08.720 So if you're looking for something that's maybe a better commuter headphone, this might not be it, 00:01:08.720 --> 00:01:14.600 but they're still actually quite compact. And you could totally take them in this carrying case, 00:01:14.600 --> 00:01:18.880 but these aren't like super travel-focused despite their size. Let's talk about this mess I've made. 00:01:18.880 --> 00:01:24.800 In the box, we get some stickers, a thank you from Antonio Mese himself. 00:01:24.800 --> 00:01:28.240 Oh, that's neat. So since this is actual wood, all of the patterns are gonna be unique. 00:01:28.240 --> 00:01:32.120 So this is distinct to you only. And in this little pouch here, we have an optional cable you can buy from Mese 00:01:32.120 --> 00:01:39.160 with a 4.4 millimeter balanced connection. And then in here, you have long cables, too. 00:01:39.680 --> 00:01:43.280 We have a three meter braided cable that goes to a 3.5 millimeter jack. 00:01:43.280 --> 00:01:49.600 And we have a shorter travel-focused cable that actually has an inline microphone and controller 00:01:49.600 --> 00:01:53.640 that does, as far as I know, play and pause. Maybe a double click will skip. 00:01:53.640 --> 00:01:58.280 Maybe a triple click will go back. One tap to play pause or answer and hang up from a call, 00:01:58.280 --> 00:02:00.760 two taps to skip, three taps to go back. 00:02:01.800 --> 00:02:06.560 I was right. I kind of impartial to this really nice braided cable 00:02:06.560 --> 00:02:11.120 compared to the fabric ones, but I don't have a balanced output with me today. 00:02:11.120 --> 00:02:15.200 How's the memory on it? And look at that, there's like no cable memory. That's a sign of a high quality cable. 00:02:15.200 --> 00:02:19.680 Is that even though it was wrapped up and shipped across the country like that, it's basically a straight line now. 00:02:19.680 --> 00:02:23.560 There's no curls or curves in it. As you can see with these cables, 00:02:23.560 --> 00:02:27.200 they have a little bit more memory. Like, see how that curls back up? 00:02:28.280 --> 00:02:33.320 That'll come out probably with wear, usually. Ow, did I just burn myself on that? 00:02:33.320 --> 00:02:37.560 Holy crap. Holy crap. Also in that pouch, you got a quarter inch adapter 00:02:37.560 --> 00:02:41.400 and an airplane adapter. These are becoming more and more rare. 00:02:41.400 --> 00:02:44.960 Collectibles now. I kind of wonder why they give you the two pouches. 00:02:44.960 --> 00:02:48.440 I guess maybe this is a little bit nicer than taking this thing, but if you're gonna be taking these things 00:02:48.440 --> 00:02:52.120 and you're gonna take this, so you might as well just fit this in here. 00:02:52.120 --> 00:02:54.560 I don't know. Oh, come on. 00:02:57.000 --> 00:03:01.400 Meze. Burnin is the process for exercising new audio equipment. 00:03:01.400 --> 00:03:05.240 The main purpose of Burnin is to process is to loosen the diaphragm of a newly crafted headphone 00:03:05.240 --> 00:03:08.320 and to stress the headphone driver. Most audio files agree that sound quality 00:03:08.320 --> 00:03:12.280 will be noticeably improved after Burnin. The 99 classics require 40 hours of Burnin time 00:03:12.280 --> 00:03:17.600 to reach their optimal performing state, but I have some thoughts about Burnin. One, there is pretty much no evidence out there 00:03:17.600 --> 00:03:20.880 that suggests that Burnin is a noticeable effect 00:03:20.880 --> 00:03:24.800 or is required on pretty much any headphone. Two, if it is required, 00:03:24.800 --> 00:03:30.440 why aren't they doing that themselves before they send this off to me? Why wouldn't they just blast these with audio for 40 hours 00:03:30.440 --> 00:03:34.760 and then send them to me? Like, why would they send me something that doesn't sound good when I buy it? 00:03:34.760 --> 00:03:37.760 That would increase the odds of me being like, I don't like these, I'm going to return them. 00:03:37.760 --> 00:03:41.400 So just make them sound good when I get them. Don't try to explain to me in your manual. 00:03:41.400 --> 00:03:45.880 It's just in here on audio file. Yeah, oh yeah, sorry. Yeah, I guess, I guess I'm not, well. 00:03:48.120 --> 00:03:52.480 No, it means I'm not. Most audio files agree that sound quality will be noticeably improved after Burnin. 00:03:52.480 --> 00:03:57.020 Yeah, that's kind of some fluff 00:03:57.020 --> 00:04:00.840 that I don't really appreciate and we should let people know that 00:04:00.840 --> 00:04:04.680 that's not really a thing. But something I do like them including is a frequency response graph. 00:04:04.680 --> 00:04:10.080 But you have to take this with a grain of salt because it doesn't actually say what this was measured on. So it's like, you can't really compare it to anything 00:04:10.080 --> 00:04:15.600 because you don't know what they used. They have dynamic neodymium slash mylar 40 millimeter drivers. 00:04:15.600 --> 00:04:21.120 The frequency response is 15 hertz to 25 kilohertz. The sensitivity is 103 dB at an impedance of 32 ohms, 00:04:21.120 --> 00:04:24.720 which means that you can expect these to be pretty easy to drive with anything, 00:04:24.720 --> 00:04:30.880 laptop, phone, you should be set. Man, I love the feeling and the polish 00:04:30.880 --> 00:04:34.480 on this walnut wood. It's really nice. 00:04:34.480 --> 00:04:39.100 Meze also points out that all of the wood used for these are from trees at the end of their life cycle, 00:04:39.100 --> 00:04:43.200 which is neat. And replacement serviceability stands true 00:04:43.200 --> 00:04:46.380 for the rest of this thing. We got only nuts and bolts in here. 00:04:46.380 --> 00:04:49.640 There's no glue holding anything together so you can fully take them apart. 00:04:49.640 --> 00:04:53.320 The build quality is pretty solid. The steel headband is like, 00:04:53.320 --> 00:04:57.320 despite its thinness is very, very rigid. Maybe if you really went for it, you could bend it, 00:04:57.320 --> 00:05:01.960 but I wouldn't call these quite delicate. The headband itself is made of polyurethane leather, 00:05:01.960 --> 00:05:05.000 so plastic leather. It's always suspension type headbands that I find are really comfortable, 00:05:05.000 --> 00:05:08.240 although I do worry with the weight. Oh no, that's okay. 00:05:08.240 --> 00:05:12.080 That's pretty good. What they've avoided, they've avoided an issue that some headphones have is that 00:05:12.080 --> 00:05:17.400 if they're not heavy enough and their headband is a little too tight, they start to like pull up on your ears 00:05:17.400 --> 00:05:21.520 as you listen to them. Then you find that like your headphones kind of pushing your lobes 00:05:21.520 --> 00:05:26.120 and no one wants their lobes pushed. Let's be real. The ear cups are mounted on like a ball joint kind of thing. 00:05:26.120 --> 00:05:32.000 You have a very small amount of swivel and tilt and then height adjustment is done by the elastic headband. 00:05:32.000 --> 00:05:37.440 Noise isolation sounds pretty good. In terms of comfort, these cups I find are deep enough for my ears. 00:05:37.440 --> 00:05:40.680 If you have ears that stick out more, you might find that they're not quite deep enough 00:05:40.680 --> 00:05:44.480 and you're hitting a pretty hard plastic kind of inner housing 00:05:44.480 --> 00:05:47.600 and enough space for most ears. They're pretty spacious ear cups. 00:05:47.600 --> 00:05:51.080 So I wouldn't be too worried about that. I think that these are actually really comfortable. 00:05:51.080 --> 00:05:55.520 The tension on the band up here is at a really great level that even if you kind of wiggle, 00:05:55.520 --> 00:05:58.680 the ear cups don't climb up. They stay seated. 00:05:58.680 --> 00:06:01.680 They're not clamping too hard. They feel very luxe. 00:06:02.760 --> 00:06:07.120 Hey, you guys want to like talk to me right now? Okay, the sound. They're not the most isolating closeback headphones 00:06:07.120 --> 00:06:09.200 I've heard. Like talk to me, Andrew. 00:06:10.360 --> 00:06:13.200 I didn't say, I said talk to me, Andrew. 00:06:14.200 --> 00:06:18.960 Yeah, that's what I wanted to do. Okay. Listen, guys, we're all friends here, right? 00:06:18.960 --> 00:06:22.240 Well, that's what I wanted to do. Come on. I'm nice. 00:06:22.240 --> 00:06:25.480 I guess now the next thing to do is to take a listen. 00:06:25.480 --> 00:06:27.040 It's not that it's a bad song. 00:06:28.800 --> 00:06:29.760 So I'm tired of it. 00:06:32.840 --> 00:06:36.680 They're so loud. They aren't wrong. 00:06:36.680 --> 00:06:40.680 It do get loud. They are easy to drive. 00:06:40.680 --> 00:06:44.920 I will say that when you get to the really loud volumes that you probably never will be or should be listening to. 00:06:44.920 --> 00:06:51.400 The sound gets a little compressed, but again, you really should never be playing these that loud. 00:06:51.400 --> 00:06:56.840 You should now be listening to me on the microphone, including the 99 Classic by Meze Audio. 00:06:58.040 --> 00:07:01.160 How does it sound? Can you hear my typing on my keyboard? 00:07:01.160 --> 00:07:05.480 Can you? Can you? Really, it's kind of more of a value add 00:07:05.480 --> 00:07:08.760 than it is supposed to be like a dedicated communication microphone. 00:07:08.760 --> 00:07:11.960 Meze positions this as a fun headphone. 00:07:12.480 --> 00:07:15.880 And you know what? They ain't wrong. They have a nice boost in the bass region that makes things kind of, you know, 00:07:15.880 --> 00:07:21.560 thump a little bit more. And they're not like overly brittle or shrill. 00:07:21.560 --> 00:07:25.600 And they're not like overly sparkling or sibilant in the high end. 00:07:25.600 --> 00:07:29.680 Though I wouldn't say that their treble is exactly perfect. There's some weird bumps up there, 00:07:29.680 --> 00:07:36.120 but you could either EQ that out easily or maybe it's just an acquired taste that I don't have. 00:07:36.120 --> 00:07:40.560 Overall, I think these things sound pretty okay. And if you know other reviewers who like them 00:07:40.560 --> 00:07:44.560 as they sound signature and you agree with them on a lot of things, then go with them. 00:07:44.560 --> 00:07:49.360 But that's just me. What does Labs say? If we take a look at the frequency response graph 00:07:49.360 --> 00:07:52.640 provided by Labs, we can see that yes, there is indeed that bass bump 00:07:52.640 --> 00:07:58.440 that happens right around the 200 Hertz region. The nice part is that there's this dip at 300 Hertz 00:07:58.440 --> 00:08:04.080 that prevents the bass from becoming like too muddy. As I said, that makes kind of a boomy, warmer sound. 00:08:04.080 --> 00:08:08.280 And if we go through the mids, things seem pretty chill with a little bit of a dip at one killers. 00:08:08.400 --> 00:08:12.560 And then at the upper mids in three and a half, oh, just south of four kilohertz, 00:08:12.560 --> 00:08:16.360 there's that big kind of treble dip, which I think is part of where I found 00:08:16.360 --> 00:08:21.680 that kind of weirdness in terms of presence. And then we jump up to a bit of an overemphasized area 00:08:21.680 --> 00:08:25.740 in the five kilohertz to nine kilohertz region, at least compared to our target, 00:08:25.740 --> 00:08:31.040 which could make things sound maybe a little sibilant. I didn't find it to be too obnoxious for me. 00:08:31.040 --> 00:08:35.000 Now, the important thing to note is just because something deviates from our target, doesn't mean that they sound bad. 00:08:35.000 --> 00:08:40.280 Our target is meant to show what would sound good to maybe 65% of the population. 00:08:40.280 --> 00:08:44.160 That leaves a whole lot of people who might not be satisfied by a headphone 00:08:44.160 --> 00:08:47.640 that matches our target. Also, like, what a boring world we'd live in 00:08:47.640 --> 00:08:50.680 if every headphone sounded the same. This would be boring to me. 00:08:50.680 --> 00:08:54.720 They have passive noise isolation that is pretty typical of any close-back headphones. 00:08:54.720 --> 00:08:58.640 You know, bass noises, they don't get really canceled out. Bass noises and things below like kind of 00:08:58.640 --> 00:09:02.120 the 1000 kilohertz region don't really get attenuated very much. 00:09:02.120 --> 00:09:06.760 You usually need active noise cancellation to deal with those kinds of frequencies. 00:09:06.760 --> 00:09:10.680 It's pretty par for the course. And the fact that these aren't like a super tight clamping headphone or anything like that 00:09:10.680 --> 00:09:13.880 means that these are not the most isolating, 00:09:13.880 --> 00:09:17.400 but, you know, they're close-backs. So you're still gonna be able to block out a few things, 00:09:17.400 --> 00:09:21.120 especially once you put on some music. And for the mic, the inline microphone, 00:09:21.120 --> 00:09:25.740 which dangles on the left side of the user's head, our lab is yet to get its anechoic chamber. 00:09:25.740 --> 00:09:30.500 So you can see that below 80 hertz, our AC unit in our building came on 00:09:30.500 --> 00:09:34.880 and that kind of threw off the results, so ignore that. For the most part, the mic is very, very flat 00:09:34.880 --> 00:09:39.320 all the way up to about 1500 hertz. 00:09:39.320 --> 00:09:43.680 After the, around the 1500 hertz region, the microphone kind of starts to dip. 00:09:43.680 --> 00:09:48.560 That's gonna make you sound a little muffled. A lot of important speech sounds like T's, F's, P's, 00:09:48.560 --> 00:09:52.820 a lot of the consonants and stuff exist in that space. You're not gonna be unintelligible, 00:09:52.820 --> 00:09:56.480 but maybe just a little muffled. At the end of the day, I think that the meses, 00:09:56.480 --> 00:09:59.680 they're a nice luxury feeling pair of headphones. 00:09:59.680 --> 00:10:03.720 They look so good and they sound pretty great too. 00:10:03.720 --> 00:10:07.360 And they're gonna cost you about $309. But for the next two weeks, 00:10:07.360 --> 00:10:12.200 Mese is hooking our audience up with a special deal. It's easy, just click the link in the description 00:10:12.200 --> 00:10:17.280 and use the code shortcircuit20 at checkout. You'll save 20% on your purchase of the 99 classics 00:10:17.280 --> 00:10:22.240 in either walnut silver, which we just talked about, or walnut gold, the better color. 00:10:22.240 --> 00:10:27.240 Plus, that code will also get you free shipping on your new pair of 99 classics. 00:10:27.240 --> 00:10:30.280 Thanks for watching this video. If you liked it, well, there's a lot more where these came from, 00:10:30.280 --> 00:10:34.280 so why don't you hit that subscribe button and then check out future videos. 00:10:36.400 --> 00:10:38.680 And if you didn't like it, tell your enemies.