Geek Wold GK10 Impressions
No knowledge of the graph, first 15 minutes of listening impressions:
The GK10 has a warm, bassy, and V-shaped presentation. The bass is bloated with a mid-bass tilt; it’s quite punchy, but it sounds overly hollow. Tonally, the GK10’s lower-midrange is goopy; the pinna compensation appears to be more relaxed, but that could just be the sheer bass balancing things out or due to a dip to the upper-midrange. The lower/mid treble of the GK10 sounds noticeably emphasized over the upper-midrange. It’s also sharper in the attack than the rest of the IEM; this is jarring and surprisingly fatiguing to hear. The GK10 generally has little air after this point.
After seeing the graph and (struggling through) several hours of listening:
Holy moly, the GK10 is bassy. I’d been listening to my Tanchjim Tanya before, which has quite a lot of bass in its own right, so it didn’t hit me at first. Personally, I find the GK10’s bass to be almost incessant, and this is coming from a pretty ardent basshead. Sure, I feel like there’s some “swing” to the range of the GK10’s bass, but everything else is a wash. Literally. The decay and the general texture of the GK10’s bass sound quite plasticky, not unlike the dynamic drivers I’ve heard in KZ’s IEMs. Stack on gobs of mid-bass and you have a hollow, farty response that ultimately leaves me wanting. There's no comparison here in terms of raw tuning relative to the Tanya, much less in the intangible department against the Sony MH755.
I find most other things about this IEM to be quite messy too. The midrange is sluggish and blunted in transient attack. That’s fine, this IEM is only $50. Yet, the speed of the midrange is quicker than the bass. The midrange decays quicker with more etch to it, so you have a slight collision of timbre. Furthermore, on something like Runaway June's "Head Over Heels," I can hear the drums in the bassline struggling to keep time with the vocalists; it sounds like their rhythm is off by a hair of a second.
Still, the highs are the worst part of this IEM; they sound overly sharp and give me the impression that I’ve been stuffed inside a fluffy mattress and needles are being shoved through. They clearly do not match the rest of the sound spectrum at
all in terms of transient attack. Maybe it's the piezoelectric drivers (upon closer examination with a sine sweep, they do appear to be extending further, up until maybe 13kHz, before they start rolling off), but the longer I listen to this IEM, the more I find myself having to take breaks to rest my ears, and the worse it sounds. Something like Girls Generation’s “Flyers” genuinely makes me gag. Hearing the GK10 struggling to decipher the bassline from the more forward vocals, all while the treble pierces me from every direction, is overload on my ears.
You'll notice that I haven't actually talked much about the tuning of the GK10 which, in all honesty, I think would be
okay if it weren’t being completely cannibalized by the bass response. Looking around at a few graphs, I see some discrepancies, so I’m not sure what’s going on there. But it doesn't matter much because most of the things I’ve criticized are baked into the driver configuration of the GK10. It would take nothing short of a complete driver overhaul for me to change my opinion, and there's a reason why most IEMs in this price range are single-DDs. That said, I don’t feel like anyone is getting straight shafted here (it’s only $50 at the end of the day) and I love me some hype. I just wish something legitimately
good got hyped.
Score: 3/10
All critical listening was done off of my iBasso DX300 and iPhone X using the stock accessories. This unit was burned-in previously for 30+ hours.
