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The Meze Empyrean continues to be the headphone that I go to for both reviewing and for simply enjoying the music. Rare, indeed, is the product that is transparent, musical, and truly engaging. That the Empyrean is also one of the most aesthetically beautiful headphones that I have come across, easily validates a form follows... Read More »

Empire Ears is a family-owned In-Ear-Monitor (IEM) company based in Atlanta, Georgia, that, collectively, brings over thirty years of experience in acoustical engineering and product manufacturing. As I mentioned in a previous review, every audio equipment company's product has it unique voice—neutral, warm, reference, detailed, bright, vivid etc—and its form. The Empire Ears' voice is,... Read More »

In the late 1990's, prior to Apple's creation of the iPod, the company, IRIVER, had been manufacturing consumer electronic products and some of the first portable music players in the world. Music players that were capable of both lossy and CD-quality music playback. For the next twenty plus years IRIVER would continue to produce portable... Read More »

If you think about it, every musical instrument has its birth, grows its shape, as it chooses its skin—metal, wood, glass, reeds—and develops its own unique tone / timbre. Though there are various families—woodwinds, brass, strings, keyboard, idiophones, friction instruments, and percussion—that share, within families, similar to overlapping voices. And there are literally hundreds of... Read More »

We review products across a relatively narrow band, a niche, if you will. And our niche is dichotomous, generally, in that it supposes that great transparency and superb musicality can coexist in the same piece of audio equipment—headgear. Our research has revealed that we are, indeed, in a quite narrow niche, as manufacturers, to date,... Read More »

I have become quite familiar with Meze Audio, born in the city of Baia Mare at Romania's northwestern border. Their flagship headphone, the Empyrean, was selected as an AudioKey Reviews Best Product of the Year for 2020, and its In-Ear-Monitor (IEM), the Rai Penta, is an AudioKey Reviews' favorite. And not just because of the... Read More »

The Streaming Houses—Spotify, Apple, Amazon, Qobuz, Tidal, etc.—that provide access to, literally, millions of albums at home or On-The-Go (OTG), can be said to have birthed the "Glorious Age of Accessible Music (GAAM)." And the generation that is, arguably, best suited to take advantage of this is Generation Z (<20yrs)—the largest population segment at 25.9%,... Read More »

That so much transparency—detail, macro/micro-dynamics—and music lies within these small and, relatively, inexpensive IEMs is, no doubt, a wondrous discovery. For more years than I'd like to recall, I have chased after the audiophile "Maltese Falcon" (The Maltese Falcon, John Huston, Warner Brothers,1941) only to be left wanting for what a given piece of equipment—speaker,... Read More »

This review of the Final Sonorous III represents, per my directive, bringing those products to light that continue to distinguish themselves brilliantly, despite a host of earlier, positive reviews. In this case, the Final Sonorous III made their debut in 2016, but I find that they are remarkably well suited to 2020! "Fun, fun, fun,... Read More »

The In-Ear-Monitor (IEM) company VISION EARS was founded by Marcel Schoenen, a former guitarist and singer for the band SUIDAKRA (folk-metal), and Amin Karimpour, a design and IEM enthusiast with an "exceptional love for detail1." The two met while working for a leading German IEM company. And it would be a shared vision—for quality, product... Read More »

Alex Rosson, as many may know, was one of the founders of the Audeze line of planar magnetic headphones, which instigated quite an audio revolution at the debut of its first and then successive models. Alex would, however, step down as CEO of Audeze to pursue other opportunities, before accepting a position with Shinola—a luxury... Read More »