The upstairs Cen.Grand stack of DSDAC 1.0 Deluxe and Silver Fox was out. That already plays on the denser softer sweeter side of things by amongst other things resampling all PCM to DSD 1'024. Downstairs however I had the discrete R2R Laiv Harmony DAC fed I²S off a Singxer SU-6 USB bridge. Here the amp can be aune's class A Evo, Kinki's THR-1 or Enleum's AMP-23R with Kinki's lateral Exicon Mosfets in a wide-bandwidth current-mode circuit. I opted for the class A/B Enleum. That setup is fronted by my usual music iMac with Audirvana Studio in extreme hog mode, its SoX upsampler set to x 4. I obviously had to forget about my usual triple-ribbon Immanis benchmark. Its tariff would buy four Poets and leave money in the till. Coming off a Ferrari is supposed to differ from a Fiat. Love the one you're with is sage advice. I was about to follow it. Soon after I had a—clearly much delayed—brain release. Meze hadn't called this model Predator, Punisher or Pugilist. They christened it Poet. And what does a poet do? Where a news journalist must call a spade a spade, a poet is tasked to come up with a more artful expression. It's what classic poetry does. It turns to song what could be a terse telegram: "Inbound. Pick up 22:30." That's not poetry. That's a military order. Once I realized that Poet simply lived up to its name, everything fell into place. From gotcha to got it in one moment of insight. Hey, I already admitted to being slow. Let's leave it there to keep my self image intact. Put most simply, Poet applies a classic leading lady's soft focus to closeups. It's deliberately prettifying. As a famous actress put it, "they go to bed with the movie star, they wake up to me." Makeup and a bit of distance can do wonders.

It's how the previous page's comments upend. It just takes a shift in perspective. Instead of a soft blur and resultant opacity being complaints or proof of lacking resolving power, they become assets. They maintain the more glamorous movie-star illusion. That looks different on screen than in the bed sheets the morning after. Simple as but still most effective in this century of 4K-this 5G-that data overload. In fact, a parallel product announcement going on its own charm offense just then was Heinz Lichtenegger's relaunch of Musical Fidelity's original tube buffer. Meant to sit between source and integrated or preamp and amp, a pair of 6922 without voltage gain may improve impedance matching but certainly also bolt on certain tubular trickery. As the boss of Pro-Ject, Lichtenegger clearly has his finger on the pulse of what buyers want. If for 2025 he can do a quaint tube buffer, why not Meze a poetically tuned headphone? Even the sealed version called Liric2 rides the lyrical train. All of it seems fully intentional when Meze's flagships go by Empyrean 2 and Elite not Elegiac and Epodic. They pursue higher resolution, not the Liric2/Poet tier. Once that message hit home, it makes perfect sense that Poet would lavish so much on a glam appearance. Look beautiful, sound beautiful. It's a unified statement. I rode it home by choosing somewhat higher SPL than normal to increase a sense of presence and impact. Greater loudness always compounds those. And there you have it, my zig then zag on Meze's Poet. Put both halves together for the proper zigzag of my full picture. Now you just have to determine which half sets your own perspective to predict what you'll think about our Romanian poet…

Meze respond: "Many thanks for sending over the review. What a rollercoaster of emotions it was to read it. But I'm glad you went above and beyond and recognised Poet's true essence. We'll post the review on our social media in the next few days. Thank you! Have a great weekend!"  Alexandra Rizoiu