Meze Audio Poet review: Planar magnetic masterpiece

It’s been 15 years since Meze Audio became 'A Thing', and well over a decade since the company established itself as an authentic force to be reckoned with.

Planar magnetic headphones aren’t its only area of expertise, but they’re high on the list – and with this new Poet model, the company is again collaborating with Ukraine specialist Rinaro Isodynamics, this time to create a pair of pricey, hard-wired, open-backed, over-ear planar magnetic headphones.

Meze Audio isn’t the only brand ready to part you from a large sum of money for a product like this, though – so is this, in fact, money well spent and able to earn its spot among the best wired headphones of today?

Price & Availability

The Meze Audio Poet launched in early 2025, so at the time of review it's almost a year old. In the United Kingdom you can expect to pay £1850, or thereabouts. That equates to $1999 in the United States – and closer to AU$3550 in Australia.

Not cheap, then – but at the same time, hardly without competition. Everyone from Focal and Grado to Sennheiser and Yamaha has a similarly priced and high-achieving alternative with which to tempt you…

Features & What's New?

Given that these are passive, hard-wired headphones, ‘features’ are fairly thin on the ground. But while the list of Poet features pretty much begins and ends with the drivers that produce sound, there’s no arguing with how thorough this feature set is.

For the umpteenth time, Meze Audio has collaborated with Ukrainian specialist Rinaro Isodynamics for the planar magnetic drivers fitted to the Poet. And for the umpteenth time, the result is thoroughly engineered and entirely uncompromised.

The hybrid driver array fitted inside each earcup here is called ‘MZ6’, and it consists of a symmetrical array of neodymium magnets on either side of a relatively compact (92 x 63mm), extraordinarily slender (0.06g) diaphragm.

The diaphragm, which Rinaro calls ‘Parus’, has an active area of 3507mm² and the magnets that surround it are designed to offer uniform activation across its whole surface.

It uses a dual-driver voice coil system that positions a ‘switchback’ coil (for low-frequency sound) above a spiral coil that’s positioned directly over the listener’s ear canal.

The spiral driver is responsible for midrange and high-frequency reproduction, and it’s carefully sited in an effort to negate any issues that might arise when the soundwaves it produces are shorter than the physical width of the earpad ahead of it.

The magnets-and-diaphragm sandwich is enclosed in a reinforced polymer housing that incorporates Acoustic Metamaterial Tuning System technology in an effort to effectively attenuate high-frequency peaks.

The entire driver assembly weighs 73g, is good for a claimed frequency response of a startling 4Hz-96kHz, has an unremarkable 101dB sensitivity and an equally helpful 55 ohms impedance.

Performance

If you’re after a full and frank account of your favourite music, from a pair of headphones that doesn’t seem to feel the need to make it All About Them, you’ve come to the right place. The Meze Audio Poet is an egoless product, and more than happy to take themselves out of the audio equation as much as possible.

Thanks to a combination of neutral tonality and completely even-handed frequency response, the Poet sound is natural and unforced as can be. Yes, these headphones extract and contextualise a huge amount of information from a recording, and yes they create a large and well-defined soundstage.

But it’s the direct and confident nature of their overall character that’s most immediately engaging. Where eloquence and positivity are concerned, these Meze Audio are a match for the very best of their price-comparable rivals.

Low frequencies are properly controlled, with excellent rhythmic expression as a knock-on effect. Bass sounds are deep, textured and endlessly varied – and it’s the same story at the opposite end of the frequency range, where treble sounds have bite and shine but sufficient substance to prevent them sounding splashy or thin.

The midrange in between is open, expressive, loaded with detail both broad and fine, and communicates in a complete and explicit manner. The transition from one area of the frequency range to the next is smooth, and every area is given equal weighting.

Really, it’s only a slight reticence where the broadest dynamics of ‘quiet’ and ‘loud’ are concerned that prevents the Meze Audio Poet from ticking every box. They can make the differences in attack, intensity and simple volume perfectly apparent, but the distance between two extremes is not as pronounced as it might be.

But when it comes to the dynamics of harmonic variation and what-have-you, these headphones are on a par with anything any alternative model can muster.

Design & Usability

You can’t get carried away when it comes to the design of over-ear headphones, of course – all you’re trying to do is suspend a couple of speaker drivers above a listener’s ears, after all. But Meze Audio is developing a design vocabulary of its own, and the Poet is another example of it.

So the headband arrangement is a two-tier affair – very slender titanium alloy wires join the magnesium yokes and hinges at the earcups, while beneath them there’s a broad, slim suede leather ‘headrest’ that’s the actual point of contact.

The headrest isn’t appended, but the earcups use a good amount of memory foam (covered in pleather) to make sure the comfort quotient stays high. The earpads are magnetically attached, so can be easily removed for cleaning.

The earcups themselves, meanwhile, are made of steel and feature quite an intricate pattern to allow them to be ‘open’.

The headband adjusts using a ‘friction pole’ that’s rather at odds with the opulent nature of the rest of the design. It works perfectly well, but it’s not especially luxurious – and it’s not all that impressive a feat of engineering.

It doesn’t help that the Poet is, like almost every pair of Meze Audio over-ear headphones I’ve worn, quite large – certainly too large for those listeners who are blessed with a more petite head than the average.

If they fit, though, you’ll find these headphones are comfortable despite their 405g weight – the clamping force and hanger arrangement is very well judged indeed.

Using the Poet is straightforward enough, of course. They’re supplied with 1.8m of TPE-covered copper cable that’s been hand-braided – each earcup must be wired, so one end of the cable splits to a pair of 3.5mm terminations. At the other end there’s a 6.3mm connector – which is a bit of disappointment, frankly.

These are expensive headphones, and subsequently we’re all entitled to expect an option or two where cabling is concerned – it certainly isn’t asking the Earth to expect a balanced cable as an option.

Meze Audio Poet review: Verdict

Get beyond the lack of a balanced connection, keep your fingers crossed that your head isn't too small, and then pretty much everything about the Meze Audio Poet seems designed to delight.

These headphones deliver a direct, confident and impressively musical listen, are beautifully constructed from tactile materials, and comfortable no matter how long you intend to listen.

The roll that Meze Audio is currently on shows no signs of slowing. The Poet is a masterpiece of wired over-ear work that justify the not inconsiderable asking price.

Also consider

The most obvious rival to the Meze Audio Poet, at least where sound quality is concerned, comes from the Grado GS3000x Statement. Age has not diminished these headphones' potency in the slightest – the Grado are a stunningly positive and entertaining listen. Like most Grado headphones, they look a bit agricultural when lined up against as elegant a rival as the Meze Audio – but they most certainly have it where it counts.