Meze Audio builds on its success, literally, with new STRADA headphones

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Meze Audio has the ability to present headphones as an expression of design, ritual, feeling. The trick is making engineering feel like craftsmanship, and the Romania company’s new STRADA is no different. If you’ve followed PopSci’s Meze headphones coverage—from the 105 SILVA being framed as a wearable refuge to the POET’s “whirlwind romance” of design and sound—STRADA continues that same human-first thread, but with the door gently pulled shut behind you. It’s a closed-back dynamic driver headphone that offers enough isolation to lean into a voice, a kick drum, a little studio air.

STRADA is built around a 50mm dynamic driver platform first introduced in the 109 PRO, newly retuned for closed-back control. The carbon fiber-reinforced cellulose composite dome promises to keep treble detail clear with minimal distortion, while a semicrystalline polymer torus, coated with beryllium via Physical Vapor Deposition, adds stiffness and snap. Precision-cut 45.5° grooves refine control, and a copper-zinc alloy stabilizer absorbs micro-vibrations to reduce distortion. How that may translate to tone: punchy, defined lows, a neutral midband that lets guitars and voices keep their true color, and highs that sketch texture and space without turning tracks into a fatigue test.

All that is mounted within exotic Macassar ebony with golden-brown striations (familiar from the LIRIC II), a hand-painted deep-green magnesium chassis with a subtle metallic shimmer, and magnetically mounted pads that snap on with a reassuring little ‘yep.’ At 330 grams, with a soft cross-pattern headband that spreads pressure and lets air flow, it’s made for long sessions as bassline bloom and vocals murmur intimately. Specs stay sensible (5 Hz–30 kHz, 40 Ω, 111 dB, THD <0.1%, dual 3.5 mm jacks), and the whole thing is fully serviceable. Available from today, Jan. 21, for $/€799 worldwide.

Need to turn a corner into a STRADA listening station? The recently revealed iFi iDSD Phantom is a $4,499 all-in-one DAC/network streamer/amp that’s hilariously overhill in the best way. This compact stack features quad Burr-Brown conversion, a streaming engine up to 768kHz/DSD512, DSD2048 and K2HD “remastering,” USB-B 3.0, coaxial, AES/EBU, TOSLINK and Ethernet inputs, and enough Class A power (7,747mW peak) to make even the most stubborn headphones behave. No matter what you need to stream or convert, the iDSD Phantom can feed it to 3.5mm, 4.4mm balanced, 4-pin XLR, dual 3-pin XLR, and both positive and inverted phase 6.3mm outputs. And then there’s iFi’s signature ability to season to taste, with J-FET solid state snap or GE5670 tube glow, XBass Pro, XSpace Pro, and various filters. Plus, iFi already knows what Meze’s warmth wants. The ZEN CAN Signature MZ99 was tuned around the 99 Classics’ voicing, so synergy isn’t guesswork.

We’re looking forward to auditioning one, if not both, of these for future coverage.

 

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