Meze 105 Silva: Beautiful Design, But How Does It Sound?

Okay, so this is the Meze 105 Silva, and Meze is a brand that always comes out with products that are exceptionally well designed visually, and the build quality is also incredible, but the question is always, does the sound quality match the visual and mechanical and industrial excellence that they are known for? And at least in my experience, this has been a little bit hit and miss. Now, with their recent releases, Meze have been steadily improving their acoustics, so we're going to try and figure out if that's the case with the Meze 105 Silva as well, this is competitive for all aspects of the product, not just its visual and industrial design. Okay, let's get going with the video. Okay, just a quick disclaimer here. This unit was sent to me by Meze for evaluation.

A big thanks to Meze for sending it in for review. Of course, I haven't been paid to say anything in particular about this headphone and all thoughts and opinions here are my own. So let's dive right in here and talk about it. And I also have the Meze 105 AER here to be able to compare to because, you know, they're kind of part of the same line. This is just the new one that's a little bit more expensive. I believe this one comes in at around $499, whereas the 105 AER, I think, I'm not sure how to say that, is $399. Similar mechanical design as far as how they wear, but the visual design is very different. So let's start there. Let's start with how it looks.

The Meze 105 Silva, I mean, all you need to do really here is look at it. This is one of the most incredibly cool-looking headphones that I've come across. It looks like it could fit well in kind of like a futuristic antique shop, something from Andor maybe. You got this wooden outside section and then a matte black grill. I think in the past, some of their designs have been a little bit too much for me visually, bordering a little bit on gaudy, but this one really nails it. I love the way that this looks and I like it better than the way that the 105 AER looks as well. piece here for the grill. Anybody with trypophobia is going to have trouble with that one, but not the case with the Silva.

Love the visuals. They did a great job here. And for the rest of the mechanical and industrial design, it's also top notch. Very, very comfortable when I wear it. No issues with the clamp pressure whatsoever. Just a note here for anybody who does have issues with the clamp, if it's too much for you, you can actually bend the rods here out a little bit, and that does make it a little bit less clampy. I know this from the Meze 109 Pro, it's the same kind of design here. The pads are ovoid, and there's lots of space here inside the cup, and they're very plush, cushiony, and comfortable. They are removable, but keep in mind there is this plastic ring on the inside of the pads that is meant to keep it flush with the baffle to maintain its structure.

Now, for those who are familiar with the 109 Pro, so the more high-end headphone in this same lineup, there are differences between that one and this one as well. Not only is the driver different, but the inside of the baffle design is also different. Ornamental grill on the 105 Silva and also with the AER. They have a different kind of structure there with a little bit of damping going on. But as far as the majority of the design of this headphone is concerned, you know, to do with the chassis and the housing and the headband and all that stuff, it's very similar to the 109 Pro and it's very good in my opinion. Now let's talk about the sound quality here.

And this is where I've felt that with this line of headphones, the 109 Pro was still always the best. It was not the kind of smooth treble that I tend to look for, and it made it so that certain recordings came across with an extra kind of harshness, and just it didn't sound smooth and clear the way I like things to sound for my treble. The Meze 105 Silva does a better job there. It's going in the right direction, but I still feel that it's not quite there. So let's get into the data, and I'm going to show you guys all of the things that I'm talking about to do with this headphone, the things that I like, and the things that maybe aren't quite for me. possible by headphones .

com. Headphones . com is not just another audio store. They've empowered reviewers such as us here on this channel to do all kinds of technical deep dives, and their support has given us the tools and resources to understand sound quality better than ever before. If you find any of the information we provide here on this channel useful or interesting, consider joining our community and checking out headphones. com the next time you're shopping for some new audio gear. Okay, back to the video. So I'm showing you guys here the graphs done on the B &K 5 and 2. 8, and this is of course the positional variation that you can expect from this headphone, at least measured on this system. And in general, we know that preferences fall within a range, and that's why you see this darker shaded area here.

That's kind of the ballpark for where we want things to fall. The dotted line is a tilted diffuse field for anybody who wants to get into the weeds on that. But you can see that the Silva is not going strictly for neutrality or anything like that. There are some colorations here. The question is more whether or not they are tasteful, whether or not they are pleasant colorations. And some of them are, in my opinion. So you can see that the bass is a little bit forward here, particularly in the upper bass and in the mid bass. I actually quite like the way that the bass sounds on this headphone subjectively. Yes, it is a little bit forward and prominent there, but what I find is that this gives it a good balance between that sense of slam and impact and physicality, that extra sense of hardness and texture for bass tones without sounding, you know, bloated or muddy or, you know, too boomy.

Noticeable as the mid and upper bass, but again it's not a massive elevation or deviation in the bass, it's just a little bit more forward and it's not done in a way where it kind of crowds out the mids, at least subjectively, so the bass and the mids I think are pretty good with this headphone. There's a bit of a dip there in the mids at between one and two kilohertz; I don't mind that too much. And then things get kind of unfortunate in the ear gain and the treble with this headphone. Meze tends to do this thing where they emphasize the upper regions of the frequency response, so the frequencies above 10 kilohertz. It's a very common thing for most of their headphones. And this tends to have several consequences, again, subjectively.

One is that there's this extra ethereal sense of shimmering that kind of goes on with most of the music that you're listening to. So if you hear a cymbal hit, you hear more of the sizzle and airy kind of like splashy stuff up top, less of the tonal focus of the cymbal. And this is a character that I feel, but to me, this mainly comes across as a bit of a hit to timbre. So it doesn't sound quite as natural or appropriate as I would like. The other thing that this does is it can actually mask some of the other imbalances that you might end up having a little lower down in frequency. So in the lower treble, you can see this on the graph as well.

That stuff is not nearly as perceptually relevant because of the upper air boost that this has. And I was messing around with EQ with this headphone. I gave it a peak filter around eight kilohertz because there's a pretty meaningful dip right there. Around 10, 11 kilohertz, but then that also revealed some of the problem areas lower down in frequency. And so I kind of felt that that trade-off wasn't really all that worth it. And of course you can EQ this headphone to your heart's content, and I recommend doing that, but this was initially a situation where I thought, oh, just two filters would make this sound great. And then I realized, no, I actually need to do more and the trade-off isn't really worth it.

So comparing the Silva to the AER, you can kind of see what I'm talking about here, where the AER has more of that harshness throughout the treble. Some of those resonances you see there can come across as a bit fatiguing. That's not as subjectively noticeable to me on the Silva. It's just that it has this extra zingy and shimmery character up top, which is a consequence of the balance that this has basically above 8 kHz. That's why this sounds that way. It almost sounds like, for certain treble tones, like I'm inside out, which is kind of a weird experience. So ultimately, I feel the story for the Silva should be that, yes, it is an improvement over the 105 AER. Acoustically, to be competitive with products that are less expensive and that's really where this one falters for me.

With that said, I want to kind of make a point here. I was thinking about what headphones to compare this to and really one of the problems that we end up with is we tend to associate price point with quality, and in a certain respect that is true. But when it comes to sound quality, it is not the case. So, here is the Sennheiser HD 550. And I feel that the HD 550 sounds better than the 105 Silva. The 550 is considerably less expensive-it's about $200 less-and it sounds better. But that also comes with a trade-off. What is that trade-off? Well, this is a fairly rickety, plasticky, non-premium feeling headphone. You compare that to this, everything about this feels like what a high-end headphone should feel like and what a high-end headphone should look like.

I'm not going to pretend that that doesn't matter. So here's what I want. I want the sound quality of an HD 550 or something like this. In the headphone design of a Meze 105 Silva. And I actually think that Meze is the company that can do this because for all of the other aspects to the design, they've nailed it. You know, they've made a thing that feels exceptionally premium here. It's just that the sound quality doesn't quite match that. And as I've said multiple times, I feel that the Sennheiser HD 550 sound quality or some of the other headphones, again, that are in that $300 price range, they can compete with headphones, that are twice as much. So when we are paying twice as much, I feel we should be able to get both.

But so far, there really aren't that many headphones that do that. When I think about the products that I want to be using, I want to be using this. I want this to be my main headphone. Like even if I compare this to headphones that like the Hi-Fi Man, you know, Aria and Veiled or something along those lines, the really high-end stuff, I would rather be using one of these because it looks and feels exceptional. You know, it's the kind of product that would, it and I think I want to wear that. It makes me want to listen to music, but it doesn't compete for sound quality. And that's kind of the problem that I feel the industry is in right now. It's like you have to choose the thing that you care about the most.

And that seems to entail a meaningful compromise for all the other things. You know, the HD 550 might sound great. But nothing about the way it looks and feels makes me want to put it on my head. It's the way that it sounds that makes me want to put it on my head. Then there's the 105 syllable where it's like, this makes me want to listen to music. But then once I start listening to music, I feel it's just not quite there and then I look at other products, like you know, the Cosmo or the you know, other products that I love the sound of, like the higher-end stuff as well. That also comes with its own trade-offs; it makes me feel like an absolute moron when I'm wearing it because it looks ridiculous.

And you know, somebody needs to do this. Somebody needs to be able to execute on all of these things: the design elements, the acoustic elements, the comfort elements, the build quality elements, everything. And this is where I have some optimism because again, Meze has been improving things. Maybe they are the ones, maybe Meze can do this. I think they're on the right path, but with the Silva, they're just not there quite yet. And that's going to do it for this video. Once again, interested in the additional measurements that we do of these headphones, that will be linked in the description below at forum. headphones. com. And of course, if you'd like to chat with me or other like-minded audio people, you can do so in a Discord, also linked below. And until next time, I'll see you guys later. Bye for now.