AME Gaia Review: Let’s Redefine High Fidelity
Nowadays we’re watching a variety of Chi-Fi brands rising to our attention and our classic OG brands from other countries slowly fading away. Of course, this doesn’t mean to discriminate or view negatively towards the surprise of Chinese brands. Still, it’s more the unfortunate economic change happening in the audiophile world where the diversity of countries and brands is shrinking.
While Asian countries have been uprising if looking at a bigger scale, South Korea was and is one of the major Asian countries involved in the portable audio market. Although multiple remarkable Korean brands have faded away to the past and the ones still existing are striving, many of them struggle to take priority of this tight competition.
That also makes it rarer for new DAP or IEM brands to approach from South Korea, though we finally got one recently – not any stuff but a good one. Today we have AME, a quite new premium IEM brand from South Korea.
Well, it may be “new” to the international market, yet AME has been serving the local Korean market since 2015 with various products. After polishing their R&D skills for almost a decade, AME is now marching out to the global market, with their twin flagship IEM – Raven and Gaia. This time we’ll be reviewing AME Gaia, the 1DD+6BA+4EST Tribrid IEM with gorgeous stabilized wood shells, retailing for $3240, the same as the Raven.
Packaging
Gaia comes in a simplistic box yet is packed with a variety of accessories. Other than the earphones, Gaia comes with the following including:
- Leather carry case
- Leather-finished earphone stand
- Cleaning tool
- Leather cable tie
- Metal warranty card
- Micro-fiber cleaning cloth
- 3 pairs of AME Blue tips
- 3 pairs of Spinfit tips
- 3 pairs of Comply foam tips
Full-Stabilized Wood Earpieces
Every pair of Gaia is unique as they all differ in pattern and color. There are also numerous budget or Chi-Fi IEMs using stabilized wood (or resin art to make it look like stabilized wood), yet AME begs the differ when it comes to sourcing and quality of these stabilized woods. AME explains they’ve specifically chosen higher-end Ukrainian woods over cheaper woods that could be sourced from China, and only use the valuable portion of the stabilized wood for better quality and looks.
The pair of Gaia we’re featuring for the review features a beautiful yellow-green wood with lush and high-definition colors and patterns, differing in quality compared to the cheaper IEMs that have also used stabilized woods. Looking at these earpieces in person sure tells me AME has used higher-quality or premium wood for making the shells.
Techs behind of AME Gaia
When it comes to specifications and features, Gaia is a tribrid IEM utilizing 1 dynamic driver, 6BA, and 4EST tweeters, along with AME and Gaia’s proprietary drivers, soldering, internal wires, and structure. The 8mm graphene dynamic driver serving as a woofer is specifically produced and tuned to pair well with the rest of the 10 BA+EST drivers. Gaia also sports a vent hole which is uncommon among BA+EST IEMs for producing the air flow AME has intended – along with relieving the possible ear pressures.
Gaia sports recessed standard 0.78mm, reinforced 2pin sockets for better durability. The nozzles are made of CNC aluminum with metal mesh. The nozzle has a neutral-thin thickness, which is good to see since nozzle lengths are getting larger among flagship IEMs. The fitting is very comfortable and the ergonomic shape allows a comfortable fit. Since the nozzles are relatively thinner and shorter, it’s advised to use one or half-size larger tips than usual if you’ve been used to fitting longer and larger nozzles (and that’s how these IEMs are meant to be fitted). In my example, I always use S or MS tips, though for Gaia the M size fits me perfectly, both fitting and sonically.
AME states the selection of quality shell material and sound tuning took three years of R&D – and the process of finding the wood meeting AME’s standard took two years alone (while sound tuning continued to progress throughout these years). Further detailed specifications of Gaia are as follows:
- Drivers: 1 Dynamic Driver + 6BA Drivers + 4EST Drivers
- Frequency Response: 20hz ~ 70Khz
- Sensitivity : 100dB(1Khz)
- Impedance : 14Ω ⓐ 1Khz (DCR 87Ω )
- Crossover network: 4-Way Crossover network
AME “Old&Wise” Flagship Stock Cable
As default, Gaia comes with AME’s flagship cable, “Old&Wise” (retails for $1200 if purchased individually). The Old&Wise cable is the necessary final touch that allows Gaia to perform its true magic. Old&Wise is an 8-braided cable comprised of Platinum-Gold-Silver alloy wires with Taiwanese OCC manufacturing procedures. What’s special about Old&Wise is that the Y-split and plug chassis are also finished with stabilized wood which uses the same woods used for crafting for AME earpieces.
The cable termination is fixed as 4.4mm (unless specially requested) and the wires are very pliable and soft, not causing much discomfort or microphonics. The weight is also fair for an 8-braid cable.
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