Posted by Pros: Incredible tuning and stage
Insane price point
Plug and play with no need to fiddle with dsp etc
Cons: I would really like a modular option since I would rather use a dap sometimes (nitpick)
Earbuds aren’t for everyone
It’s no secret I think Venture Electronics is onto something. Almost always. So when the Monk GTR came in for review I realised I had a lot of work to get done before I could review it adequately.
I think Wild Lee and VE for sending this little machine my way. It almost changed my life.
Time for a deep dive. (apparently AI uses ‘delve’ a lot. Which is likely because it was fed, amongst other things, Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings, where in Moria, the dwarves delved too greedily and too deep and woke the Balrog below the mountain).
The Monk GTR is one of the newest in the Monk line of earbuds. For those of you who don’t know, the Monk buds from Venture Electronics have a cult status for being able to deliver an incredibly organic sound at an unbelievable price and have one of the widest soundstages, like ever.
But after a slew of dsp enabled cabled, gaming IEMs, I could not wait to jump into listening to the Monk GTR. My distaste for things that make me jump through hoops to improve my overall experience stems from my laziness, I agree, but I still like simplicity. And I don’t like EQ.
The Monk GTR ticks off some of those boxes.
Very simply it’s a Monk SL Plus married to an Odyssey Retro to create the Monk GTR – the Retro Gaming Earbuds.
Now again in an all important disclosure I’m not a gamer.
I used to play Unreal Tournament when it was fun and Prince of Persia 2D a decade earlier. I struggle with Call of Duty and controllers so when I tried the Monk GTRs with a nintendo switch, it was ten minutes of carnage with me at the receiving end. I am however a fan of retro (looking) tech and good music and the Monk series does belong in that set.
I only wish I could use this with an iPod but that’s for later.
The Monk GTR comes in a no-nonsense ziploc bag. With the foam inserts of various colors. It is a fixed cable that ends in a usb C termination and the earbuds house a 14.8mm open dynamic driver that does all kinds of nice things. The buds themselves are about 16.4mm wide and have a new and improved polymer on the surface to make them more comfy. I have oddly shaped ears so one trick I use is to get really bad silicone eartips and cut a thin sleeve that sits around the earbuds. This keeps them from slipping and given that they are on the bigger side for me, adding the foams doesn’t help me much.
But this is also about sound.
The first thing that comes across is how open and wide the soundstage is. Given I like to start with bass and mids and treble when it comes to IEMs, I realize earbuds are a different animal. There is no chance of seal so the bass is never going to be booming and punchy and visceral and all that. The bass on the other hand comes across with fidelity rather than depth and rumble. The earbuds faithfully reproduce the notes. A rumble appears if you can manage to get them in your ear canals with a good seal, unfortunately I couldn’t keep that comfortable for a long time. Another way to get the bass to feel like it should is to push the volume. Angel by Massive Attack begins to get its act together with volume boost and some fiddling with the fit. That being said, this is meant for gaming. And sounding great is a very nice extra. And earbuds will not isolate sound, seal the canal and have a rumbling booming bass. Not without causing hearing loss.
The mids are crystal clear with the typical VE analog sound. I tested my entire playlist and did not find any tracks where the midrange – vocals or instruments, sounded unnatural. They have a solid natural timbre and the typical VE sound – analog, warm-ish, without sacrificing details. Some may even go as far as to call this neutral, but I think it would be apt if neutral did not mean dry. But semantics aside, this is a very easy listening, natural sounding earbud.
The highs are again detailed with little fatigue or harshness especially on long listening sessions.
The stage is where every monk earbuds blasts the competition out the water. The stage is huge and anything on this sounds like you’re in an aircraft hangar with every instrument placed exactly where it should be. Makes for a great gaming experience with what little experience I have. Though I know more avid and life-depends-on-it gamer types may prefer headphones or iems to get a better seal or passive noise isolation, but I did use this on a phone and on a Switch playing some street fighter style scroller, which was most entertaining.
I did fish out a monk plus and a nicehck and for a why not comparison. And apple earpods from the dark ages.
Both the monk plus and nicehck buds had neither the fidelity or the staging of the GTR. In addition the bass response of the GTR was far superior. The Earpods have an advantage with their better fit and sound delivery into the earcanal than around it. This makes for a better bass and over all sound but a much smaller stage. Plus I have the 3.5mm one which means they need an additional dac.
To level the playing field the other earbuds were tested with a Devastator pro 3.5mm dac.
At the end of the day, the Monk GTR exists for a very simple reason – what’s the easiest way to have an absolutely enjoyable gaming or music session without having to think too much about it. This set sits in my bag for times like that where I don’t want to stress my neurons and just want to have fun.