All the headphones you are wearing today in this gallery were created in Romania. In Baia Mare, to be exact. It was there, in 2011, that designer Antonio Meze founded a company that would come to be respected like few others in the audio world.

Meze Audio creates audiophile headphones through which every detail of a track can be heard exactly as it was intended. Models such as Empyrean and Elite, handcrafted and assembled piece by piece, are considered among the best in the world and have put Baia Mare on the global map of audio design.

Meze’s philosophy is simple: headphones are instruments, not just accessories. They are objects you return to for years, modular and repairable, designed to be passed down rather than thrown away.

In the context of this exhibition, the Meze story takes on an additional layer of meaning. Back when forbidden music circulated on cassette tapes copied dozens of times and on X-rays with questionable sound quality, listeners would have given anything for a pair of headphones through which they could truly hear what had been recorded.

Today, we have both the freedom and the tools. It is a privilege worth using with care.