Meze Audio 105 AER

REVIEW
Simon Lucas
Jul 14, 2026

Listening to the Meze Audio 105 AER, it’s not surprising that ‘Aer’ is the Romanian word for ‘air’. It’s certainly less startling than discovering that Romanian headphone expert Meze Audio is aware of a place called ‘the real world’. In fact, this is where most of us live. For most, spending nearly £400 on a pair of headphones constitutes a significant investment.

Most surprisingly, though, is that after making this discovery, Meze Audio has designed a pair of open-backed, wired over-ear headphones priced to appeal in the real world. After all, this is a company that has no trouble regularly producing utterly uncompromised planar magnetic headphones. Then it charges ten times the £369 it’s asking for a pair of 105 AER.

Broader Group

Is Meze Audio experimenting with the 105 AER? Or is it genuinely trying to connect with a broad group of consumers it has hardly mentioned before? Luckily for the rest of this review, I strongly believe it’s the latter.

There’s been no corner cut in the design of the 105 AER. The need to meet a real-world price means some of the more esoteric materials Meze Audio favours don’t feature. Nevertheless, from the slim, stamped magnesium that forms the outer headband to the equally slim, self-adjusting PU leather headband that makes contact further down, the 105 AER are carefully specified. The earpads are made of velour over memory foam. The velour cover can be removed for easy cleaning. The earcups behind them are constructed of ABS-PC thermoplastic, which looks good and feels nice. This also helps keep the (cable-less) weight down to a sleek 336g.

The cable itself needs to be connected to both earcups, so Meze Audio provides a 1.8m braided cable with two 3.5mm sockets at one end and a single corresponding socket at the other. A 6.3mm adapter is also included. A circular pouch in the hard-zip-fastening travel case keeps your cables (and the headphones) organised when not in use.

The cable transmits its electrical impulse to a pair of 50mm full-range dynamic drivers. These drivers are very similar to a design used in some of Meze Audio’s more expensive models. There have been modifications to the driver membrane and frame. Although the company does not promote the specifics to keep costs down, the design is mostly retained.

W-shaped

This means the 105 AER are equipped with a ‘W’-shaped dome driver made of a cellulose/carbon-fibre composite. Meze Audio values this material for its durability and relatively light weight. It is surrounded by a semicrystalline polymer torus that is similarly lightweight. In addition, its vibration suppression and resonance damping are, as the company claims, outstanding. Distortion is further minimised by the zinc/copper alloy stabiliser placed around the very edge of the driver assembly.

Meze Audio has measured the 105 AER at a sensitivity of 112dB and an impedance of 42 ohms, and claims a frequency response of 5Hz-30kHz. None of these figures is discouraging in any way.

Despite the beautiful measurements of these headphones, there are some concessions to consider if you want to be among the first to own Meze Audio over-ear headphones. In line with the company’s usual approach, the 105 AER are quite substantial. Therefore, anyone with a head smaller than ‘quite large’ might find that the self-adjusting headband does not adjust enough. A balanced cable with either a 2.5mm or 4.4mm connection is a good value, costing around £49. The open-backed design easily leaks sound — though this is not unique to Meze Audio.

And besides, once you’ve got your quite large head inside a pair of 105 AER, there’s much more to enjoy than to worry about. With the 6.3mm termination plugged into an iFi iDSD Diablo 2 headphone amplifier/DAC, and with music coming through an Apple MacBook Pro (loaded with Colibri software to enable hi-res functionality) and a Naim Uniti Star (serving as a network streamer and power source for a Rega Apollo CD player), these headphones are no chore to listen to.

Meticulous neutrality

Perhaps most immediately striking is the meticulous neutrality of the tonal balance Meze Audio has achieved. Mark Lanegan’s remarkable version of ‘You Only Live Twice’ from his Imitations album [Heavenly Recordings] faithfully maintains its gentle suggestion of warmth. At the same time, the relatively cool, blue-toned sound of Ezra Furman’s Restless Year [Bella Union] is conveyed with confidence. In this respect, the 105 AER seem perfectly willing to step aside for a recording. An egoless attitude like this is by no means common in a pair of headphones, regardless of how much or how little you are paying.

And Meze Audio show a similar stance on frequency response. Whether or not they extend down to 5Hz is a moot point. What matters is that the 105 AER reach very deep and can hit very hard. There is no lack of control over low-frequency sounds, so their rhythmic presentation is very positive. The headphones also balance the emphasis across the frequency spectrum quite well. There is no noticeable ‘V’-shaped curve in the frequency response, which lesser designs might produce to make sound more assertive through the midrange. Instead, the transition from the bass to the treble is smooth and seamless.

Lavish

At every stage, the level of detail approaches ‘lavish’. The 105 AER can reveal and contextualise every piece of information it receives. Its ability to create such a large, well-defined, and accessible soundstage is highly beneficial. It communicates most clearly through the midrange. So, with vocalists as distinctive as Aretha Franklin or Mark E. Smith, there’s never any doubt about their attitude, emotional state, or technique (or lack thereof). Transient details are managed with a casual authority that consistently reassures the listener they’re receiving the full, unaltered picture.

The subtle harmonic overtones and undertones in a solo instrument are given proper emphasis. This focus on dynamic change includes the loud ‘quiet/LOUD’ fluctuations in volume that are equally clear in a recording of Mogwai’s Like Herod [Chemikal Underground] as in Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5 in D Minor, Op. 47 [Leningrad Masters] conducted by the Leningrad Philharmonic under Yevgeny Mravinsky. The distance the 105 AER can create between ‘contemplative’ and ‘attacking’ is remarkable. Moreover, they achieve this without sounding strained or compromised.

More than nuts and bolts

However, while the 105 AER proves to be impressively skilled in every technical aspect of music production, including the nuts and bolts of creating a convincing sound, they never lose sight of the fact that music is meant to be entertaining. Some headphones that excel at providing a faithful transcription of a recording seem to forget the purpose of the exercise entirely. But the Meze Audio are more engaged than that.

They handle all of the technical details competently (to say the least) and manage to combine each aspect of audio reproduction into a convincingly unified and singular whole. Most importantly, they do this without sacrificing any of the energy and character within a recording. “Up and at ‘em” is not an easy attitude to describe when discussing sound quality, but you know it when you hear it. The Meze Audio 105 AER has it in abundance.

At this point, I’m sorely tempted to ask “What more do you want?” – but I know I’ve already answered that question. I want a balanced cable, and I want a physical design that doesn’t exclude quite so many people from enjoying how the 105 AER performs. But setting my contractually obligated nit-picking aside, it seems clear these headphones add another tick in the ‘Meze Audio successes’ column. And for once, at a price that doesn’t exclude quite so many people as usual, regardless of their head size.