Meze just made a $999 headphone cable that nobody really needs

Meze Audio just announced it’s selling a headphone cable for an eye-watering $999. Yes, nearly a grand for a single cable that connects your headphones. It’s called the Ultra, it’s hand-braided in Romania, and the company says it only makes one per day. The pitch is that its pure silver wire moves your music faster and cleaner, for “a more precise, transparent, and uncolored sound.”

The truth is, it won’t do that. No cable will, and we’ve spent the better part of a decade proving it with objective measurement equipment rather than adjectives.

A cable’s job is to get a signal from one end to the other without losing much of it along the way, and the only thing that really threatens that is resistance. Silver has slightly less resistance than copper, which is true and also beside the point, because the amount you’re removing across four feet of wire feeding a pair of headphones is a rounding error. Resistance only starts mattering when it’s a meaningful chunk of what it’s feeding — long runs of speaker wire, where thicker really is better. Headphones draw so little power that the cable in the box is already doing the job perfectly.

We tested exactly how far you can push that, in the least dignified way possible. My colleague bought a bunch of steel coat hangers from a dry cleaner, straightened them out, soldered them to the cheapest connectors he could find, and measured them against proper copper cable. Steel and zinc are terrible at carrying a signal, which was the whole idea — this was meant to be the worst-case scenario. The two measured within about 1dB of each other almost everywhere, which is roughly the smallest volume difference a person can pick up on at all. Then we posted blind audio samples and asked readers to choose the better one. Nearly 3,500 votes later, they couldn’t reliably tell a coat hanger from a real cable.

None of which means the Ultra is necessarily a bad product. Cast metal housings, a continuous braid with no solder joints anywhere in the signal path, and an Alcantara-lined case make for a genuinely lovely object, and there is nothing wrong with an audio company selling lovely objects to people who want them. The problem is that Meze attaches a sound claim to it. The moment you tell someone a wire will reveal their music in its purest form, you’ve stopped selling craftsmanship and started selling an upgrade that doesn’t exist. And the people who spend the $999 will likely repeat that claim to everyone else, which is how a myth this thoroughly debunked keeps finding new life.

So if you want it for the aesthetics, buy it. Spending money on something beautiful is allowed, and we’ve said as much before about braided jackets, lifetime warranties, and connectors built like tanks. Just know what you’re actually buying. The cable that came in the box with your headphones is already transmitting every bit of the signal; the $999 one will transmit the same signal, no better, just at a rate of one per day.