Can CCA and KZ agree to chalk this up to an engineering experiment gone wrong and never try it again? I say this knowing full well there's a KZ equivalent, and an 8-driver version I am staring at right now arrived unsolicited from KZ. If anything, I have some hope that KZ, CCA, and GK are henceforth going to sport better tuning based on what recently happened with the KZ ZEX Pro, which turned out to be the KZ x Crinacle CRN in disguise, and the CCA CRA that costs even less. Those are two $20–30 sets that appear to have been tuned better than the CCA CA24, while being simpler in design, too.

The CCA CA24 is currently the company's flagship in their "let's stuff as many drivers as we can and flaunt about it" phase, and even so, I spotted the company misleading customers with marketing talk, and the product naming having many think there are 24 drivers inside each side. Based on my experience with 12 drivers per side, I think it's a good thing we don't actually have 24 drivers in each IEM. The build quality and design of the CCA CA24 shells are really the best thing here, which says a lot about everything else. I will say I am a fan of the QDC covered 2-pin cable connectors, which I want to see others implement more, too. But for $140, certainly look elsewhere instead of the CCA CA24. It's quite accomplished in being bad, and not in the hilarious way some cheapo IEMs/earbuds are badly tuned, either—just enough in many places to cause frustration over what could have been.

[Update] Soon after this review was written, multiple reports came out that KZ, and by extension CCA, is using either decorative drivers or just poorly connected/glued-on drivers for marketing claims of larger driver counts for lower costs to where the sound signature in many of its IEMs only came from 1–2 drivers as opposed to all of them. This means the CCA CA24 is likely undergoing the same, which explains the overall unnatural timbre and poor performance I have experienced here. If you needed one more reason to avoid the CCA CA24, you now have it. This will also very likely be my first and last KZ/CCA/GK review since there hasn't been a meaningful response from KZ to all these evidence-backed allegations.