Meze Audio introduces ASTRU, an elegantly engineered dynamic driver in-ear monitor

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Meze Audio has come far from its roots as a boutique disruptor. Since 2015, when it first released the enthusiastically adopted audiophile gateway drug that is the closed-back 99 Classics headphones, the Romanian audio brand has increasingly reinforced its positioning as a reference-meets-romance mainstay. While primarily known for a steady stream of harmoniously crafted headphones (we highlighted one as recently as January), Meze has regularly had wired earphones in its lineup. Since 2024, that model has been the $159 ALBA, which proved Meze could scale its philosophy of rich response and detailed design down to an accessible form. Now the ASTRU emerges as a new flagship single dynamic driver in-ear monitor that delivers elegance and coherence.

ASTRU is built around a meticulously engineered 10mm dynamic driver. Its multilayer composite diaphragm starts with a dome coated in over 80 ultra-thin layers of gold, applied during a 48-hour physical vacuum DC magnetron sputtering process. That dome is bonded to a titanium layer and mounted on a PEEK base, balancing rigidity and responsiveness. The result is fast transient snap, extended yet sibilance-free treble, rich but not syrupy mids, and the kind of full-bodied low end that dynamic drivers are known for. Equal parts emotional and physical impact, with composed imaging.

The curvaceous, comfort-minded housing is just as obsessively engineered, each chassis CNC-machined from a single block of pure titanium and refined through a multi-stage electroplating process for a satiny finish … a process said to require up to seven days per pair. The IEMs are then packaged with a premium two-pin balanced cable with CNC-machined aluminum hardware and gold-plated 4.4mm termination, a 4.4mm to 3.5mm adapter, five sizes of ear tips, and both a protective pouch and soft PU leather envelope. At 32
Ω impedance with 111 dB SPL/mW at 1 kHz sensitivity, it’s at home on both portable gear and dedicated rigs.

The Meze Audio ASTRU will be available for $/€899 at mezeaudio.com and at select retailers starting March 20. The ASTRU is being presented as serious sound without summit-fi pricing, and we’ll share first-hand impressions that day.

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Need a USB-C dongle you can slip into the ASTRU case to use with a smartphone, tablet, or laptop? Meze’s British buddies iFi recently announced the $59 GO link 2 [shown below], the company’s most compact plug-and-play solution to date. Inside a 7.8g aluminium-magnesium alloy body, an ESS Sabre chipset supports up to PCM 32-bit/384kHz and DSD256 for streaming music and hi-res libraries, with selectable filters to shape response. There’s Dynamic Range Enhancement (DRE), adding 6dB of additional dynamic range between the loudest and quietest moments, while S-Balanced output cuts crosstalk between headphone channels in half and THD+N is ≤0.0015% (1.27V @ 32Ω).

 

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