So, uh, do you like the Empy?
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Hi there!
This is a headphone I have spent many hours listening to. (I happen to own it in Gunmetal…)
I have thoughts:
1.) If you are not going to EQ, only use the micro-fiber pads. The leather pads accentuate the cans’ weaknesses and minimize their strengths in this configuration.
2.) If you ARE going to EQ (and I strongly feel you should to extract the best performance from this summit-tier headphone…), only use the Leather pads. This is because for all the good the micro fiber pads do without EQ, they blunt impact\transients - and the bass becomes muddy and messy. When EQ is applied, you allow the technical performance of the leather to come through, with agreeable tonality (which was the one reason to use microfiber).
(Yes, I realize my photos show microfiber pads throughout… but the content of my text is what should be followed - do as I say, not as I do… 
)
Once EQ’d, and using leather pads, this headphone really comes into it’s own. Supreme comfort is achieved and is a true high-tier headphone listening experience. You know why it costs as much as it does - but the EQ legwork is mandatory IMO. I won’t share any more subjective analysis RE: experience… considering maybe making my own blog
Speaking of EQ… below is the EQ I built for this headphone - based on my preference curve - with LEATHER PADS only. Graphic EQ available upon request.
I used Oratory’s measurements this time around - though I think his labeling is a bit off on some of the sites they pop up on RE: MicroFiber vs. Leather.
I hope this helps some folks
Aside, no - i wont be posting a micro fiber pad EQ… because you shouldn’t use Micro FIber pads at all if you’re EQing. Use leather.
Filters:
Preamp: -5.3 dB
Filter 1: Peak Fc 17 Hz Gain 4.4 dB Q 0.50
Filter 2: Peak Fc 41 Hz Gain 0.9 dB Q 0.87
Filter 3: Peak Fc 200 Hz Gain -4.7 dB Q 0.78
Filter 4: Peak Fc 948 Hz Gain -2.4 dB Q 1.17
Filter 5: Peak Fc 1960 Hz Gain 3.9 dB Q 1.19
Filter 6: Peak Fc 4155 Hz Gain 1.6 dB Q 1.46
Filter 7: Peak Fc 7695 Hz Gain 4.7 dB Q 2.16
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I forgot where I heard this, but I heard at some point that the Meze Empyreans are among the best headphones for classical music. I probably agree, but my headphone is (unfortunately) much more limited than the other users who have written their thoughts. I can’t say whether or not the Empyreans are better than other $3,000 headphones, but I can say a few things.
The first of which is that these are the most comfortable and easily the best headphones I have ever had the privilege to listen to. Also, being the only planar magnetic headphones I’ve ever listened to, I was interested to hear the difference between the drivers. Personally, I didn’t notice any difference at all between the leather and the cloth pads. The cloth was a little more comfortable than the leather, but they provide excellent comfort, in my experience. The comfort means they’re excellent for long listening sessions. I have a small head, and I generally find that every pair of headphones I use has to be ‘pushed all the way in’ in its adjustability, yet on the Empyreans, even with them adjusted to its smallest fit, they were a bit too big. The bottom of the ear pads practically touch my jawline, resulting in the angle of the drivers being angled a bit too far upwards. The drivers are attached to
I thought that by the time my turn on the Empyreans arrived I would have my Schiit Magnius/Modius stack, but unfortunately due to low stock on Schiit’s website and a failed ebay transaction, that didn’t work out. Although I’m currently listening using the onboard headphone amplifier in my Rode NT Mini desktop microphone, these still blow my other pairs of headphones out of the water. I am definitely not listening using the best equipment possible, but I’m also fairly sure that it hardly matters, because it seems to me like these headphones make anything you put through them sound like the auditory equivalent of a hot bowl of tomato soup on a feverish day. Being that my time with the Empyreans coincided with my second vaccine dose which was not fun at all, that’s the type of music I sought out. Anyway, just as a flub, I plugged these these cans into my Helm Bolt DAC and ran some MQA through UAPP. Having done (sorry) no research about the specs of the Empyreans, I was sure that what I would get out of them was very little volume, but I was shocked to hear that these are perfectly listenable with my “mobile” hifi setup. On my main listening setup, in which I use EqualizerAPO to achieve an EQ setup that I imagine many people would sneer at for being too bass heavy, the percussive elements of Tame Impala remain clear and precise. The wide variety of musical elements from the Gorillaz Plastic Beach album all sound magnificent. Listen to Mazzy Star and you’re practically experiencing Hope Sandoval whisper-singing right into your ears.
My only gripe is the cable it comes with. It’s flatness keeps making it get twisted up. If the headphones were mine, I would definitely invest in a new cable. Such a small issue, it’s barely worth mentioning. Overall, what a great pair of headphones. Were I to spend $3k on one pair, I would definitely want to try out some others. But honestly, what a great set of headphones. Too bad I can’t keep them!
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Uh yes. I purchased a pair used, in tiptop condition with the upgraded balanced cable at at significant savings. I have a BHA-1 in the house now on a tour and it is an excellent amp with a balance control. No need for it though, maybe if using the pre-amp output. Gorgeous sound with the HD800S but too bass heavy with the Empy’s.
The synergy amp with Empy is clearly the SW51+. Upgrades in every aspect, most notable in male lead vocals, Madman Across The Water came up on Roon Radio/Qobuz. I recognized the song and thought it was a Hi Fidelity cover until Elton started singing. Turns out it was the original version. The complete, seemingly distortion free, rendering of the vocal is where the synergy is apparent Volume can be a tricky thing, with this chain, I have found reducing the volume to a point that seems too low is better, your ears adjust and it’s all there, with better fidelity. Then turn it down again, same results.
And now there will be a SW 9, designed specifically for planars. I trust his design chops and will be purchasing one. I also have an eye out for a Spring3 KTE with volume control.
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I had an interesting experience contrasting the review pair with the used Empy’s I purchased. These seem darker. Qobuz intorduced me to Valerie Gillespie, a superb singer and sax player. The track, It Isn’t Easy Being Green starts off with that phrase sung quietly and down low. The word “being” could not be distinguished, it was lust too murky. HD800s, VO, and the most resolving LTA HP2, could distinguish 'being". Amp didn’t matter, BHA-1, SW51+ or ZDS, so wow what a difference in the 2 HP’s. Then I changed hqplayer to 4x upsampling, as it was for the review pair instead of 2x and out of the murk came “being”. I guess it’s the little things, always good to include source tweaking in an evaluation. Makes me want to try different filters. I di purchase the balanced cable upgrade for evaluation. We’ll see how the copper/silver plated goes.
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Disclaimer: This is just my opinion please don’t take it too seriously as I am just a dude who listens to a lot of doof doof untz music and likes to play with audio gear. After all this whole hobby is about preference and I know mine can be odd!
Was lucky enough to be included for the Empyrean, thanks for putting that together, which was exciting cause these headphones were on my radar to buy a few months ago. A bit of background and framing for this review. A few months ago I was interested in upgrading my LCD-2, I loved their bass but wanted more out of the mid-range and treble. Did some reading and seemed like LCD-4 and Empy were what was popping up that would fit my bill. I listen to mostly techno and house so I really wanted low end extension and details, present midrange, and fast treble that could keep up with hi-hats and claps. I ended up buying the LCD-4s but always had this nagging thought in the back of my mind about making the right decision.
Chain used for review:
Schiit Gumby Multibit A2
Schiit Mjolnir 2 with bugle boy tubes
Balanced cables from dac to amp as well as to headphone
Music Source:
Spotify. I know its not Hi-Res, but they have the most music that I listen to and sounds good enuff.
Spotify This is the playlist I used for evaluation.
Build Quality:
I feel kinda like I am beating a dead horse here, but these are super well built. I was really impressed with the “human soul storing Pulp Fiction briefcase” they come in. Picking them up they are incredibly light yet sturdy. The leather strap and pads felt super nice, but the suede pads ain’t no slouch either. Changing earpads is a breeze with the magnetic fastening system. I loved how the yokes are adjusted with that fluid slider movement. The grilles are mesmerizing, I really couldn’t stop looking at them. Overall, these are a functional work of art. Everything about them feels premium.
Comfort:
Putting these on reminded me of the Nighthawks I used to have. They feel like you are wearing almost nothing, especially compared to the 748g LCD-4 I usually wear. The headband shape and suspension system work very well and experienced no top of head hotspots. After about 30 minutes of wear, I did start to get a hotspot at the base of my ears. I was kinda surprised that something so light with a pretty agreeable clamp force got this uncomfortable. It might just be the shape of the cups versus my ears, but I found myself constantly adjusting them during my longer listening sessions. The LCD-4 are more comfortable than these and don’t require constant adjustment during listening.
Sound Quality:
Now onto what I was most excited for, actually enjoying the music. All listening was done without EQ, even though I am an EQer. I started with the leather pads and eventually swapped to suede and stayed there. I will denote where I made the switch. There will be examples of things of note in each section of listening, but my conclusions at the end of the sections are an overall impression after my few days with them.
Bass: This was my initial draw to this headphone, every review talked about the bass so naturally I was ready for the doof. I put on Dragonrush and started listening. First thing I noticed is how present the kick drum is in the mix, incredible visceral impact. The 1:50 mark comes in and the sub bass really gets kicking. Lots of quantity and slam. Compared to stock LCD-4, they have more bass impact which was a pleasant surprise. Next I put on Uncertain Smile focusing specifically on the bassline in the background. It is present and sounds okay, but when the mix gets more busy it easily gets lost almost to the point where you cannot find it even if you are listening. This was a glass shattering moment, so I dug deeper. I put on Error (1st take) and couldn’t really separate out the subbass pulses. The texture seems to get lost so I gave a switch to the suede pads. To me, they tightened up the bass response, but at the cost of impact. I kept the suede pads on from here out, as I do bass test first everything else to follow was done with suede pads on. These do bass quantity with the best of them, but its gets muddy sounding when more demanding passages come up.
Mids: I was pleasantly surprised with how the mids sounded with this headphone. Listening to My Sanity by Bad Religion was really fun, the vocals were warm and inviting. They had no problem keeping up with the speed of the guitar riffs. I had a similar experience with Life on Mars. I really enjoyed how male vocals presented on these and they seem to have more detail than the stock LCD-4. Female vocals on the other hand, which can venture into the lower treble region, I was not a fan of. All Apologies by Sinead O’Connor had some harshness that I can only describe as grating and overly sharp. It isn’t all doom and gloom for the mids though, they have a warm enveloping tone to them that really makes non vocal music shine. There are some busy synth sections in Seems Like Yesterday that really get you lost in the warm soundscape it creates. Piano also shines on these, super natural sounding with a sense of size that impresses. Mids might be what this headphone does best.
Treble: This is where the headphone lost it for me. I was not a fan of how the highs are presented. It seems like these headphones are just trying to hammer you with as much detail as they can, but in a way that doesn’t have finesse. Hi-hats in Creep Workout have this overly sharp quality to them that make them piercing in an unnatural way. The Wata Igarashi remix of Eternal Blue has a long section of building tension with high pitched synths, and even at moderate volumes it was entirely too much, I had to switch tracks. Quite a shame really, because the scale that these headphones have would made for a very fun “close your eyes and get lost in the music” listening experience for this track. Speed and decay sounded very natural, just something sounded off about their sharpness. The treble isn’t bad, but it lacks the refinement and tonality of a $3000 headphone.
Soundstage/Imaging/Presentation:
The Empy’s soundstage, for me at least, was very much in the bridge of my nose. This isn’t a deal breaker for me, as I don’t really value headphone soundstage. The thing that was most interesting was how the bass sounded in the overall mix, it seemed like it was coming from higher up. Probably due to the driver design, but it makes the bass seem out of place. The only real comparison I can make is to a poorly integrated subwoofer in a stereo setup. I was able to place the bass in a different spot from the rest of the mix and I was not a fan of that. Instrument placement on the other hand was pretty fantastic. The drivers are incredibly fast, so they had no issue with instruments bleeding together and becoming a wall of sound. Scale of sound is what these do very well, when you start pushing some volume into them you really get rewarded with a concert in your head. Its a super fun experience and I found myself getting chills pretty frequently during my time with these, seriously throw on Dream On and find out!
Final Thoughts:
I had a lot of fun putting these through their paces and am very happy I had this opportunity. While these headphones have top tier build quality, I found their tonality and presentation to be a bit lack luster for the price. The bass comes off as bloated and not as articulate enough for a TOTL, yet it is still fun. With a sound signature that is on the warm side, I am puzzled at the grating and fatiguing listening experience. My last night with them I threw on some music, looked over at the LCD-4 and immediately packed up the Empy. I think if I had gotten the Empy and hadn’t heard the LCD-4 I would have been happy with them, but after living with another TOTL for so long I was a bit let down. At $3000 they don’t wow me, but if they were $2000 they might be more of a contender. Don’t get me wrong, the Empy is a fun listening experience, in the way that blasting music in a car with 2 12s in the trunk is fun, it just lacks the refinement of other headphones in this price range.
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Thank you for the EQ settings, you just Metallica out of my basement and up onto the stage! Much Kudo’s!~!
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Any experience with EQ in ROON?
I tried this filters with parametric EQ, and find the sound more open and detailed. Will have to listen some more to have a final verdict, but five minutes in I am impressed. Thank you!
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Funky - I created this EQ in Roon and found the same as you with my Emperyeans. Much better sound stage and detail with the leather pads.
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Prelude: Before I get into my impressions of this headphone, I have an unapologetic PSA for anyone on this or for those who will be participating in other gear tours. Be respectful of the item, these wonderfully crafted headphones are a bit beat up, there are two separate dents on the each grill, the size of a thumb. The outer boxing was had the faint smell of mold and god knows what, once open the rank jumped out at me. While it appeared to be the result of taking care and using recycled materials to package the inner Meze box, it was quite nasty to experience upon opening. The culprit appeared to be old foam and flattened boxes used as packing material. I would have excused this had a similar experience of opening the Meze briefcase did not also have the stench, and also a scattering of cat hair and some debris of an organic nature.
So instead of being excited to begin trying these headphones out right away, I had to toss the box and the packing materials in the dumpster and do my best job of cleaning the headphones and case without causing any harsh chemicals. 
Upon shipping off to the next person I made sure to provide a thorough cleaning ( there was some other nasty bits found and will spare you all the details), and also ensured that a new box and related packaging materials were provided. The FedEx store was happy to assist for the low cost of $13.00, irony that I was the 13th person on the tour…
BLUF: If this was my only headphone, and matched with an old school burr-brown DAC and I listened to electronic music be it rap, EDM, Industrial etc….these would be great.
Part I: Exploratory Phase
Other participants, and previous reviewers have done a wonderful job capturing the comfort of these headphones. They are lighter than they look, they remain stable on the head and there is little if any clamping forces. The one issue I had with them is they would run hot at times, and felt they were not as breathable as my other headphones. Maybe the suede pads would have helped the leather a bit, honestly I had nothing to clean the suede ear pads with so I did not bother using them.
How I really felt about these headphones could best be understood through the lens of this movie scene:
The first night I tried them and I was very much into them, I was thinking these are good, I dig them, they brought some nice moments.
All the listening was done through this chain:
TT2/HMS → Bryston BHA-1 (XLR output/HighZ) and or directly our of the TT2, Woo Audio OTL (for shits and giggles)
All the amps provided a different window into the Empyrean. The OTL surprisingly sounded better than I had expected, most OTL amps I have tried do not play well with planar headphones. The best amp in this scenario was the BHA-1, the TT2 amp had ample power yet the enjoyment for me came out of the BHA-1 amp. I listened to a lot of electronic music on this night, and some other tracks from the likes of Nine Inch Nails where Head Like a Hole came through quite nicely.
Part II: WTF Phase??
On the second night I realized this was a facade, I experienced the exact opposite, the staging of the music felt off. The mids were non-existent and overall there was no cohesion in the music presented.
As if the left and right drivers had the music panned to the extremes and the sound engineer forgot to mix the song. At first I thought it was the particular track I was listening too, no it was not. I listened to a variety of music from Massive Attack, Radiohead, Iron and Wine, Bon Iver, The Rolling Stones, and even Taylor Swift.
On most of my headphones the presentation is typically right in front of me, on these I felt the need to dart my eyes left or right at times to get a sense of where it was projecting the stereo image. It was a bit nuts, I had a drink or two and most definitely not enough to lose my auditory sensation.
In speaking with someone who own’s these, provided me with a visual analogy to describe what I was hearing with the presentation. Consider a 27” computer monitor, you are viewing and with the proper distance you are able to see everything on the screen with little eye or head movement. With the Empyrean it was as if I was using a 48” Ultra Wide monitor, and the presentation was the bottom left/right corners of the screen.
So perhaps there is something wrong with this particular headphone, if others who had these in the tour would kind chime in on this?
Part III: Zip ties, duct tape, jugs of water, and…
I decided it was time to give them a run with a few different DAC options, and maybe headphone amps to identify if the synergy was not there. Guess what, my 2010 DAC from a company most of you have not heard of sounded the best of the bunch, it meshed better and brought that weird presentation into focus a bit more than the Bifrost 2, Chord Mojo/Poly or TT2/HMS.
In this set up they were enjoyable to a fault, would this be worth compromising on using other gear much more capable across a variety of other headphones I own? No, for me the enjoyment factor trumps everything, I want an emotional response from my music. Sadly, the Empyrean was not able to provide that for me.
Perhaps this is exposing my novice skills in the hobby, as this is something else completely. So I will try to use the audio-foolery terms I constantly see and laugh at when I read it. The tonality was pleasing, the resolve was well executed, the PRaT was I have no F’ng clue what that represents. Don’t get me started on the term plankton, organisms that are unable to move on their own and end up being eaten by other aquatic life.
Coda
So what should you walk away from reading this, other than wasting about five minutes of your time? Listen to this headphone for yourself, there is a reason why it is polarizing, and my reasons for not giving it a thumbs up has nothing to do with its price. All these high end headphones are over-priced, as is the equipment we use to enjoy them. Let us not pretend we all already know that, yet still pay high dollar for these items. If you are unaware and you still buy them, then ignorance is bliss.
So if this was a $2k headphone, or a $4k headphone, my takeaway is exactly the same. I would not buy them, they do not fit the sonic experience I strive for.
Equipment Used
| Amp | DAC | Headphone |
|---|---|---|
| Chord TT2 | Chord TT2/HMS | ZMF Verite |
| Bryston BHA-1 | Chord Mojo/Poly | Audeze LCD-2.2 |
| Woo Audio WA3 | Schiit Bifrost 2 | Senn HD650 |
| Musical Fidelity X-Can V3 | Musical Fidelity V-DAC II |
*pardon grammar, misspellings, and other writing style errors
18 Likes
Entertaining and pretty succinct in my experience with the few sets of them I have had…Leather Pads, EQ, and Silver Cable brings them to life and old of the dungeon in my experience also. As for the dents, you can take the drivers out and push the dents out from the inside very easily…don’t ask me how I know.
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That Hall Pass reference though 
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Glad you like it. 
You’re wrong, period!
Lol j/p, it’s all preference
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Perfect gif selection 
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I would have been pissed to receive a headphone to audition in that condition.
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I am sure I pissed a bunch of people off by bringing it up, it needed to be said out in the open for full transparency.
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It’s disrespectful to all involved. Good that you pointed it out.
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Was there no documentation with pics and what not involved?
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I am sorry, not following your query.
I have pics to demonstrate, choose not to post them as I did not want to take away from my listening impressions. In terms of informing @TylersEclectic who hosted the tour on behalf of the forum, yes I did all that the day I received them along with the pictures too.