Hello, I just joined, primarily for the audiophile products. Looking at purchasing the NHT C3 speakers for our new living room. Space is about 15 feet wide by 33 long and they will fire long ways. Space is just for general listening, music room with all equipment is downstairs, so hoping they will fill it with sound nicely. Cheers.
Mar 18, 2024
Also, may we request info on where these cans will be built? China or Romania?
Cheers.
And I think that because of the description:
”We tested different drivers, reductions of -3dB bass, -5dB bass... But Community Feedback & over a year of sentiment analysis boiled down to: “Don’t take away what makes the sound of this headphone special, don’t make it into something it is not.” So, this is a warm, bassy headphone with a lush enjoyable sound.”
Only time I ever heard the Meze 99 described as bassy was after they changed the ear pad dimensions last year and the fact they tested reducing the bass by -3 to -5db alludes to that as a common complaint was the bass became bloated by an amount in that range when the ear pads changed.
Its worth noting too that all of the reviews linked with the exception of Darko were done in 2016 before the pad change. Only Darko’s is fairly recent and he touched on the bass issue in his review
Edit: Now that CeeTee has confirmed these have the larger ear pads these will be a no go for me as this is when the bass issue reared it’s head with these cans because MEZE didn’t bother to retune them. From my research the only people that thought these got better with the larger pads are the basshead crowd. Now I like to have cans in the arsenal that have strong bottom end but not at the expense of the mids (which is why I love my TH-X00 Ebony) Metal571 discussed the issue when he reviewed them after the pad change. He described them as Bass Monsters with too much bass bleed into the mids. You can watch his review here:
https://youtu.be/RnjD04NIFlc
Too bad because they look terrific in this color scheme
The 99 Classics and 99 Noir are designed in Romania and made in China.
Hope that helps and thanks for the interest!
And just FYI... Pad-swapping will likely be to detrimental to the sound (Brainwavz pleather pads). Perhaps non-angled real leather pads would be acceptable... but probably reduce the treble.
Be sure to read TheHawk's post above. He brings attention to the fact that the Meze 99 Noir uses the newest pad iteration. Compared to the Meze 99 Classic with their original pads, the new pads have more interior (ear) space... but increase the bass and decrease the lower-mids. Please see this article and pdf for more details:
https://www.innerfidelity.com/content/meze-99-neo-around-ear-sealed-headphones https://www.innerfidelity.com/images/Meze99SeriesAndPads.pdf
Prospective owners of the Meze 99 Noir: As you know, the Meze 99 Noir is based on the Meze 99 Classic. Many reviews of the Classic were done the headphones' original pad design, which resulted in a more-balanced sound. But the Noir does not come with those 'original' pads. The 'new' pads make the Meze 99 a bass-focused headphone with reduced vocal presence.