Meze Audio 99 Classics (2nd Gen) review: These wired headphones are simply wondrous

Don’t just glance and then look away – the 99 Classics (2nd Gen) may look very similar indeed to the model they replace, but Meze Audio hasn’t spent the 10 years since the original launched just sitting on its hands.

There have most definitely been big changes in the 99 Classics that are worthy of your attention if you're looking for a pair of the best wired headphones at an affordable price.

Price & Availability

The Meze Audio 99 Classics (2nd Gen) launched at the very end of October 2025, and in the United Kingdom they sell for £319 a pair. That equates to $349 in the United States, and AU$649 in Australia.

‘Affordable by Meze Audio standards’ is not automatically the same as ‘affordable’, of course, and at this money the 99 Classics (2nd Gen) find themselves lining up against some very credible price-comparable opposition from the likes of FiiO, Grado and Sennheiser (to name but three)...

Features & What's New?

By its own admission, Meze Audio wants the 99 Classics (2nd Gen) to be a better-balanced and more neutral listen than the model it replaces. It has gone to lengths to ensure this is the case.

As regards getting the audio information into the headphones in the first place, changes have taken place. The first is the cable that’s supplied – it’s now a 1.8m length of dual-twisted, Kevlar-covered oxygen-free copper with two terminations at one end (both earcups must be wired) and a 3.5mm jack (with 6.3mm adapter supplied) at the other.

There’s also a USB-C DAC dongle included in the package – so you can use any headphone socket-less source of music simply by plugging your dongle into its USB-C slot and then attaching the cable to the other end using the 3.5mm input. It’s an excellent solution and a very welcome feature.

Where the cable is attached to the earcups, the jack shell is now wider – so if you want to investigate alternative cables, it will be easier to connect them even if their barrels are quite wide. And there’s now a tiny vent above each jack shell, designed to help with low-frequency performance.

The drivers that deal with the cable-borne information have changed too. They’re still 40mm, the same size as in the original model, and they’re still backed by neodymium magnets – but the diaphragms are now made of polyether ether ketone rather than mylar.

Meze Audio has paid attention to the baffle in front of each driver – slimmer beams, combined with a more open grille, attempt to minimise diffraction and reduce high-frequency artefacts.

On top of this, the company has improved its production processes in an effort to improve driver-matching – this will have benefits for sound quality in general and stereo imaging accuracy in particular.

Meze Audio reckons this reworked arrangement is good for frequency response of 15Hz to 25kHz, and is claiming some very agreeable figures for sensitivity (103dB) and impedance (16ohms) too. The 99 Classics (2nd Gen) should be no trouble for even modest sources of music to drive.

Performance

As far as audio performance goes, the 99 Classics (2nd Gen) need very few excuses made for them. In fact, I can only think of one area where they are anything less than thoroughly impressive – so I may as well get it out of the way immediately.

These Meze Audio are not, in absolute terms, as dynamic as they might be. When a recording goes through shifts in volume, or intensity, or attack, the Meze Audio do more than allude to it but stop short of describing it completely explicitly. Some alternative designs at similar money can put greater distance between the quietest and the loudest episodes in a recording.

After this, though, all the news is good. Meze Audio has certainly achieved a more neutral, less toasty tonal balance with these headphones – the 99 Classics (2nd Gen) don’t impose themselves on a recording anything like as much as the model they replace.

They’re very even-handed where frequency response is concerned, too – from the (deep, solid) low-end to the (bright, substantial) top-end, the journey is smooth and fuss-free, with no area overstated or overlooked.

They are capable of generating a large, well-defined and spacey soundstage – and they can describe the position of the participants on it quite explicitly. There’s proper attention paid to the spaces and silences as well as the actual occurrences in a recording, and the overall presentation is unified confidently.

There’s a singularity to the way the Meze Audio describe a performance that’s far from common in headphones at this sort of money.

Detail levels are very high at every point. Low frequencies are just as varied and textured as they are deep and punchy, and in the midrange the 99 Classics (2nd Gen) can communicate a vocalist’s intentions fully – attitude and emotion, as well as tone and technique, are made completely apparent.

At the top of the frequency range there’s a brilliance that stops well short of hardness or glassiness, and again there’s an absolute stack of information revealed and contextualised. Even the most subtle, transient details concerning harmonic variation in a voice or an instrument are identified confidently.

Those low frequencies are quite carefully controlled, too, so there’s directness and positivity to the way the Meze Audio express rhythms. Momentum is always available, and these headphones seem to drive recordings forwards without ever seeming pushy or in any kind of hurry. The clean, even-handed tonality and frequency response allow the bass information to serve as an underpinning, rather than as a separate entity.

Switching to the USB-C DAC dongle is very instructive – because if you connect it to a laptop or a bog-standard smartphone, it quickly becomes apparent that these devices’ D-to-A conversion processes are some distance behind what the dongle can achieve.

There’s greater scale, more detail, and a more coherent impression of performance when using the dongle rather than relying on a smartphone to take care of business.

It also confirms that a dedicated headphone amp/DAC costing a solid three figures is a better bet still – no particular revelation, that – and plugging the Meze Audio dongle into the USB-C slot of a pricey FiiO digital audio player reveals the dongle can happily handle FLAC and WAV files and plenty more besides, but can’t deal with DSD.

Design & Usability

While the 99 Classics (2nd Gen) remain recognisable as a pair of Meze Audio headphones, and share an awful lot in visual terms with the outgoing 99 Classics in particular, this is no reheated design. Important changes have been made – it just doesn’t look like it.

As is established Meze Audio practice, a self-adjusting vegan leather headband sits inside a slender metal outer frame. Here they’re attached to each other using gold-coloured cast zinc hardware – and there’s more of this material connecting the outer frame to the earcups.

The earcups themselves are, just like the previous model, made from CNC-machined, hand-finished and polished walnut – its acoustic properties are long-established. The earcups are larger than previously, though, and this increase in internal volume is designed to improve low-frequency control by minimising standing waves.

This has required an increase in the size of the earpads too, of course – they’re still of medium-density memory foam covered with vegan leather, but the increase in size means there’s a little more room for your ears. They also use a new six-point connection arrangement that allows them to be easily removed.

All-in weight (without cables) is a skinny 290g. The clamping force is nicely judged, the earpads don’t immediately give you back your own body heat – which means the 99 Classics (2nd Gen) are about as comfortable over the long haul as these things ever get.

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The biggest drawback to Meze Audio 99 Classics (2nd Gen) ownership is the size of your head – if it’s not big enough, these headphones will swamp you.

But if they fit, there’s really no downside – from build quality and the standard of finish and, most of all, the sound quality, the 99 Classics (2nd Gen) are right among wired headphones front-runners.

You’ll be hard-pushed to find a more effective combination of sound quality, specification and build quality for this sort of money.

Also consider

The FiiO FT5 are more expensive than the 99 Classics (2nd Gen), it’s true, and they’re not quite as dramatic to look at – but their planar magnetic driver technology means they have most certainly got it where it counts.

If you’re after something a little more affordable, though, yet don’t want to scrimp on sound quality, the Hi-X50 by Austrian Audio deserve your attention – their humdrum looks are strongly at odds with their vivid and exciting sound.