For those occasions when one can't just turn on the music with other people doing their thing, I wanted a good set of headphones for my iPhone. There are so many headphones around, and many of them have their devoted fans who won't hear of any other headphone having the same quality. The frustrating thing is that most of the reviews judge those headphones in terms of how they relay pop music or rock music... and the demands of classical music are so different that it makes it almost impossible to gauge how those headphones will perform with the classical repertoire.
I tested so many headphones over more than a year. I trudged from audio shop to audio shop, from one specialist to another. Expensive ones sounded better than cheaper ones, but they didn't sound right. I'm absolutely uninterested in something for its name or the hype; I am only interested in... will it perform the function or look with the quality or standard that I want?
I finally found a relatively obscure audio company in Romania, called Meze, who specialised in what I thought might just be exactly the sort of headphones I wanted. They used wood earcups (walnut) as well as high quality parts from start to finish. NO cheap plastic parts. NOT made in China. NOT designed with inbuilt obscolescence. I read reviews from other professional musicians and people who seriously loved their music, I looked at videos, I tried to find a dealer here in Australia... I ended up getting them from Romania, and the first moment that I plugged them into my iPhone and listened to some Vivaldi, it was like being in the world's finest concert hall. The sound was warm, resonant, clean, articulating the details within the texture - wow.
