Just for anyone wondering about the Meze Empyrean frequency response, here are the measurements I’ve done on the GRAS:
Empyrean vs Harman Combined
Empyrean vs IEF Target
It’s interesting, I don’t think Chrono has seen these (I’m not sure if he has or not), but his analysis of the tonal balance is spot on. You can see the upper bass bleeding into the mids around 200hz. The rest of the tonal balance looks pretty darn good, warm but still with a good shape to the ear gain area, and then some upper treble intensity above 10khz. Note that it’s likely perceived more strange than it looks in part because of how generally warm the rest of the headphone is. So while the balance as a whole isn’t all that bad, that’s kind of where the cohesion issues come from.
The thing with the treble is that… I actually found it to have good detail despite being too ‘shimmery’ up there - and this I think is part of the isodynamic hybrid array aspect of the Empyrean.
But in general, the main drawback with this headphone is that it simply doesn’t compete for detail with similarly priced headphones, and that’s fine if you consider the comfort/build worth the extra money. It made it to the top of my “most comfortable headphones” list for that very reason.