Gigabyte Fly and H11 Headphones Review

 

Gigabyte Fly

We’ll start with the more interesting of the two pairs of headphones, the Fly. So named, we would guess, for their extraordinarily light weight. A mere 79g according to Gigabyte and from the feel of them we think that’s perhaps a bit high. They’re barely heavier than the H11’s below.

      

No your eyes do not deceive you, that headband really is thin, unpadded and akin to a sturdy paperclip. The ear-pieces themselves are equally light and thin, ensuring that at the very least you’ll never grow tired of wearing them because of the weight.

   

Gigabyte H11 In-Ear

The H11 in-ear have even less to talk about, being very much a standard pair of white in-ear headphones with a change of covers depending upon the size of your aural canal.

      

     

Conclusion

It might seem surprising that both these are in the same review and also that we’ve been brief so far. However, that’s for two simple reasons.

Firstly, these are simple headphones. There isn’t much to say. Even the Gigabyte website is notably brief. Secondly, they are terrible. Now we appreciate that these aren’t hugely expensive, and as always we have to make allowances for the section of the market that is being aiming at. We don’t expect the £10 H11 and £15 Fly to match up with the SteelSeries Flux, for example. But even at those prices these aren’t any good. We regularly joke here at OC3D that some products are so obvious you could write a “It’s a mouse, you move it and the pointer moves” type review. With these the fact they produce sound is pretty much their star feature.

The Fly is supremely light. It reminds us of the original Walkman headphones it’s so light. The sound quality though leaves much to be desired. The emphasise is clearly upon bass, but that’s at the expense of everything else. It’s not even that nice tight chest-thumping bass, but just a wooly muffle. The bass is the best part of the whole sonic experience too. So they’re light, bordering on flimsy and unless you listen to whale noises are of no interest.

The H11 is actually even worse. They look great, aping the iPod earbuds we’re all so familiar with. But the silver is cheap plastic, the actual earbuds are hard rather than soft rubber so constantly falling out, and the sound quality is similar to that you get when your neighbour is listening to their music. They are indistinguishable from a pair you’d buy in a pound shop.

Neither the Fly nor H11 have any redeeming features, and given the usual quality of Gigabyte products are a carbuncle in their product range. Some things are cheap and cheerful, and some things are cheap and nasty. These definitely fall into the latter category and Gigabyte would do well to quietly pretend none of this ever happened.

 

Normally here we’d thank Gigabyte for supplying our review samples, but we think we’d all prefer to forget this. Discuss in the OC3D Forums.