Threatening airport security is rarely wise, but Manny Marroquin had his reasons. “They pulled the headphones out, and were like, ‘What are these?’” says the celebrated mix engineer, stopped on his way back from Mexico. “Those are my fucking weapon. Don’t you mess with me.”

The weapon in question is the Audeze MM-520, the American brand’s new flagship planar magnetics, and the first pair of headphones to grace a MusicTech gear cover. More records than ever are mixed and mastered on headphones, and the MM-520 – the second product in Marroquin and Audeze’s collaborative MM-series – arrives engineered for the job’s toughest call: bass.

The prolific Grammy Award-winner has run Larrabee Studios in Los Angeles since 2001, with production credits from Rihanna to Rosalía, and began tuning Sonos products in 2012. He first mixed on Solid State Logic consoles aged 17, and speaks to us from London before visiting SSL’s Oxford headquarters to test new equipment.

He used to think mixing on headphones was a joke. “If you had told me 10 years ago I would be mixing on headphones, I’d think you were crazy,” he admits. “I used to hate that. I would laugh at people.” So what changed?

The short answer is Marroquin badgered Audeze CEO Sankar Thiagasamudram to build the professional mixing headphones he actually wanted. He was repeatedly told there’s no money in pro audio (as compared to consumer audio), but one day, Thiagasamudram finally approached him at a trade show and said: “Manny, I think we’re ready to do this.”

Marroquin worked through various prototypes with Audeze’s engineers, and the result was 2022’s MM-500. “My career is better because of them; it’s my set of speakers,” he says. It’s why he keeps coming back to work with the brand. “They took everything I told them and everything I wanted to do, and they were like, ‘Yeah, we’ll do that. Let’s go.’ They believed in me.”

The $1,700 MM-520 headphones come with a strange sales pitch: you might not need them. “I am not saying they’re better than the 500s, but it is an alternate version,” Marroquin insists. “If you own the 500s, it’s not like, ‘My gosh, I need to go get the 520s.’ Not about that at all. I want to make sure people know it’s not us trying to sell you a new pair of headphones.”

“If you had told me 10 years ago I would be mixing on headphones, I’d think you were crazy” – Manny Marroquin

A SLAM dunk

The star upgrade is SLAM, which is short for Symmetric Linear Acoustic Modulator and mercifully simpler than it sounds. Air passages running beneath the ear pad create extra space between the driver and your ear, forming a larger acoustic chamber and allowing Audeze to selectively boost the low-end frequencies.

“It’s kind of like increasing the body size of an acoustic instrument or a speaker,” explains Chris Berens, Audeze’s head of A&R. “It gives a little more resonance in the low end, and we tune that specifically for the headphone, so we have a nice, healthily reinforced low end.”

SLAM balances the air pressure on both sides of Audeze’s ultra-thin planar magnetic diaphragm, letting it move more freely and accurately. Measuring just 1.8 micrometres, the nanoscale polymer is around 40 times thinner than a human hair.

“It’s not like we’re just adding a subwoofer,” says Berens. “It really enhances everything that the driver does, which makes things [sound] a little bit wider, and gives you more accurate imaging in terms of location.”

Peter James, Audeze’s director of marketing, says the tuning target was extension rather than flattery. “The bass of the MM-520 is pretty much flat to below 20Hz. We tuned this system to get a better bass extension rather than a bass shelf, the way the Harman curve has.”

For Marroquin, the low-end obsession is where records live now. “Whether you’re doing hip-hop, pop, country, or whatever, you want to make sure the low end is tight,” he says. “Low end is the most important thing in pop music, because if it’s too heavy, then it weighs down the track. If it’s too light, it sounds weak. Low end in today’s world has to really be accurate.”

The MM-500’s slightly forward upper mids, a common gripe, have been levelled off. The cost of all this is weight. Planars run heavy to begin with, but the 520s pile on more. SLAM adds material, while new snap on earpads require eight magnets per side.

Tipping the scales at 555g, they’re 60g up on the MM-500 and tower over non-planar rivals such as Sennheiser’s 330g HD 800 S, though Audeze says memory foam on the new earpads help disperse the extra load.

Turning the tables

For decades, engineers trusted monitors and used headphones for a second opinion, but increasingly, it’s the other way round. Low end is arguably the hardest thing to get right in any room, and Berens believes even serious money doesn’t fix it. “We have a lot of pro people in the space who are really primarily referring to our headphones for bass,” he claims.

“They can trust what they’re hearing, versus their room, [which] they can’t quite trust. Even people who have invested tens of thousands in great speakers, room treatment, all that stuff, there is always something that’s not quite right.”

Marroquin still mixes on Yamaha NS-10s; a mix that survives these famously brutal nearfield monitors is said to survive anywhere. He dreamed of taking that trusted reference on the road, and the MM series became his answer. “To me, that’s like [being] a kid in the candy store.” 99 per cent of the time, he says, he runs them straight out of his laptop, streaming his Larrabee sessions via a real-time remote streaming plugin by Audiomovers.

Audeze says it intentionally designed the 500s and the 520s to function perfectly fine from most devices without a dedicated headphone amp. That’s tricky, given most planar headphones are notoriously power-hungry. The efficiency comes from the company’s Fluxor magnet arrays, which pack a denser magnetic field across the driver, so the diaphragm needs less power to move.

Rival planar makers shed weight by using fewer, smaller magnets, James says, at the cost of needing an amp. Some of the 520’s heft, in other words, is precisely what frees you from carrying one.

The deeper reason Marroquin never travels without them has nothing to do with specs. “I’m pretty sure everyone is insecure, and it’s okay to admit to it,” he says. “Sometimes you’re having a bad day, or you didn’t sleep well, your mother’s sick. That’s going to reflect on your work. The successful [people] are the ones that can cut through the BS and just focus on this one thing.” His cure for mixer’s block lives in his headphone bag. “I’m feeling a little insecure, a little lost. Let me just put them on, and immediately, I’m back. I’m back within a split second.”

“I created these headphones for the masses. This is how I hear things” – Manny Marroquin

Sony and yet so far

Audeze was acquired in 2023 by Sony Interactive Entertainment, the PlayStation arm of the Japanese multimedia company, primarily for its patented technologies, planar magnetic drivers, and audio engineering expertise. So where does a pair of pro studio flagship headphones sit on PlayStation’s list of priorities? “Clearly, it’s still a priority for us because we put it out this year,” says James. “Nothing about the Sony PlayStation acquisition has changed that market orientation. We’re going to continue developing and deploying cutting-edge sound solutions.”

Is it odd that Audeze is now part of a bigger brand that makes the MDR-CD900ST and MDR-7506, some of the most ubiquitous studio headphones on the planet? James is unbothered, pointing out PlayStation sits a long way from Sony Electronics, and “Sony’s most expensive studio headphone is somewhere around the price of our least expensive.

“If PlayStation is the car brand, Audeze is the racing division,” he argues. “We’re out there at the edge of what’s possible, innovating and trying to see what we can do.”

The proof is SLAM, which debuted before the 520 and is now what James calls a foundational technology, deployed across the range as products refresh. That includes this year’s £339 Maxwell 2 gaming headset. And just last week, a Maxwell 2 ANC variant arrived, bringing active noise cancelling to a full-range planar magnetic driver – a world-first James claims the brand has spent over a decade developing. It also adds auto-calibrating head tracking and Dolby Atmos.

So who does Audeze want to see in the driver’s seat of its newest MM-520 racecar? “It’s a studio product for folks who are serious about learning their craft and perfecting it,” says James, pointing budget-conscious buyers to the MM-100, tuned for “the same kind of vibe”. For his part, Marroquin wants zero gatekeeping. “I created them for the masses,” he says. “This is how I hear things. And if you like it, if you give it a chance, do 10,000 hours on them.”

There’s plenty riding on his own pair. Marroquin is starting Post Malone’s next album, has just finished a Quavo record with Pharrell, and tonight will be back in his London hotel room, laptop open, controlling his console at Larrabee from another continent.

“It gives me a lot of confidence,” he says. And confidence, as he puts it, “is everything”. We sure hope airport security sees it that way.

The Audeze MM-520 is now available.

Words: James Day
Photography: Simon Vinall

The post “Those are my weapon”: Inside Audeze and Manny Marroquin’s MM-520 headphones appeared first on MusicTech.