Meze Empyrean

I'm trying to contact Rinaro for a month or so and has been hunting all people with a name Pavel Schimanovich (CEO of Rinaro) in Ukraine cause I'd like to know whether they could make for me a driver that I can't make myself.

It's a very funny process. Imagine, I find some Schimanovich and call him:

- Hello. It is Pavel Schimanovich?
- Yes...
- Do you make isodynamic drivers?
- WTF?
- Uh.... drivers... for headphones...
- You're drunk?
- No. Please think once more, maybe you're making planar drivers for headphones?
- Stop calling me, idiot!
Beeep.....beeeep.....beeeep

p.s. I've already irritated 6 Schimanoviches

 

I think they developed the drivers for all the Oppo headphones.

 

I had an opportunity to listen to the Empy with stock pads at a meet last weekend. It was connected to a DAC & Amp made by Cayin (the amp was the iHA6). Never heard this combo before. The environment was noisy (it was held in the back room of a cafe with no doors between rooms).

I had it on for about 3-5 minutes and all I remember was this quantity of bass that had me wincing. I had no issues with soundstage but that is really not a priority for me with headphones. It had the usual suckout of the mids with treble being elevated. However, the treble was not a problem for me and did make it airier. Now I wish I had taken my Verum 1 to the meet since I pretty much prefer this presentation to what most planars have to offer.

I had taken my Focal Elex to the meet. As soon as I plugged it in to the same Cayin amp, the other guys there quickly came to the conclusion that the Elex was "better" than the Empy, FWIW .

 

At Canjam NYC I tried these straight out the Dave and with the HA300 which is an amp that I really quite enjoy. I did not notice a lot of bass at all - to the contrary, I felt that they were quite mid-forward, certainly more so than the Stellia and even the Diana Phi's. I left thinking that the Empyrean would probably make for excellent vocal cans on a 300b amp, but were a bit peaky and bass light on the Dave.

It does seem like there's some sample variation at play. I actually thought that they were lacking in bass, and I am no basshead.

 

Is it just me or this "sample variation" argument is being overused in a recent year or two? I see it mentioned almost everywhere now in headphoneland.

Either buying headphones outside of Senn HD6xx/HD800 series is a complete gamble due lack of production consistency of pretty much all manufacturers across the globe, or people are perceiving headphones way too differently due to physical parameters of their heads or style of wearing, or people are not able to find common terms to describe subjective sound character reliably to others. Or maybe something else?

Either way, thank god for measurements.

 

Got another set of measurements in. Here are both of them. This is with alcantara pads.

 

I just wonder how anyone could develop an opinion on an openback headphone after listening it for 5-10mins in a noisy environment with a gear that he doesn't know.

 

It's doable with practise. I doubt my own store auditions unless I get half an hour minimum with something even if it's relatively quiet, but people with good track records get benefit of the doubt.

 

^
This.

@iemcamp :
It's totally ok to confess you can't do it. But generalizing it to other people is extremely dangerous. In my perception, SBAF is packed with lots of mutants disguising as humans, whose ears can compete against bat and dolphin. No joke.

PS. As an average normal human, I can't do it, either. lol

 

With planars moreso than dynamics it's pretty easy to get a grasp of the tonal profile and general timbre of the headphone with less listening time on less familiar systems, especially given they don't interact with the OI of any given amp nearly as much.

Planars tend to scale mostly in slam and staging with better upstream gear, but tone and timbre feel fairly consistent unless they're being massively underpowered.

Dynamic headphones scale in different and further-reaching ways.

IMO, YMMV, ETC.

 

Some of my best listening sessions were done at low volumes. My ears and mentality were both really relaxed, and I was picking apart every single little texture and tone from when multiple instruments and sound elements played in harmony.

I was also in a completely silent room though, far away from any kind of traffic outside.

 

Agreed - I have a "listening" loudness and a "evaluation" loudness. When I go to shows I try to use something closer to 95 dbs. If it's just an hour or so of cumulative time over a day, a couple times each year, whatever hearing damage seems like a reasonable tradeoff to get a good assessment of a couple pieces of gear.

Using your own files and source helps - I used to bring a Hugo 2 to shows because that's a DAC that I'm intimately familiar with, and it's got a fairly neutral headphone jack. Pacing yourself is also pretty important. Even if I stretch myself, I can probably only evalute 6-7 pieces of gear in one day before everything gets fuzzy. When I go to the Canjams, I try to get a 2-3 hour lunch with friends because otherwise, I wouldn't be able to evaluate anything properly in the afternoon.

Re: the Empyrean, I did get almost half an hour on the HA300, going between them and my Diana Phi's. When I was there the Meze side of the room was surprisingly quiet, and all of the people who were there wanted to try them on the Dave.

It's not that uncommon for showroom gear to be a bit banged up, especially really new stuff where pre-production-ish units go through a couple shows back to back. I remember this being a problem with Hong Kong shows where European brands shipped demo units in ahead of time, and arrived to find the boxes manhandled by the local Fedex office.

 

Last year at CanJam SoCal, Meze sent me a message asking for some assistance. The gear and banner they brought got lost and they only had the prototype Empyreans. Being that CanJam SoCal wasn't too far away from the store we let them borrow an SPL Director and HeadAmp GSX mk2 from our collection. Still during CanJam, it was pretty hard to find their booth since they had no signage letting people know what booth they were.

With all the shows going on every year, no wonder why some exhibits seem to be a little lacking. You never know what may have been put together last minute.

 

Any other comment about the Empyrean? I am mainly interested in feedback after some weeks of usage...

 

From the people I know who have weeks of usage, some like it and others don't.

 

Comments: They’re ‘interesting’. I like them better from my SS BHA-1 vs Liquid Platinum w/ any tubes I tried. I prefer the suede pads, but it’s a tough call, and the pads def change tonality a lot. It’s weird the way they seem a bit gooey, but still convey detail very well. To my ears, least neutral of all my cans (Auteur, Utopia, Ether 2, HEKv2).

And some of us are ambivalent.

I don’t know, like I said, they’re interesting. It was an impulsive purchase. I can sell them and not lose too much. Haven’t really decided yet. I keep comparing w/ E2 — pretty big contrast. No pats sought