FiiO EH11 - The first on-ear headphone I actually like.

I like expensive headphones just fine, but every so often a very cheap product comes along and reminds me that good sound is not locked behind a giant price tag so much as it is locked behind patience, adjustment, and a manufacturer giving you the tools to fix what needs fixing. That, for the most part, is what the FiiO EH11 is about.

At around $32, this wireless on-ear is not fancy, not luxurious, and certainly not polished. But it does two things that I think matter a lot more than its price would suggest: it fits me far better than most on-ear headphones, and it gives you full parametric EQ in the app. Both are crucial, and make what wouldn't ordinarily be something exciting, into something I can actually recommend to people.

Value and positioning

I would not recommend the EH11 as some miracle product that demolishes everything without effort. Out of the box, it does not. 

However, I do think it makes a real value argument precisely because it gives you meaningful control over the sound at a price where most companies would rather hand you a bad preset and call it a day.

This is a wireless Bluetooth on-ear headphone that costs about $32, sometimes less, and FiiO includes parametric EQ. In a category where far more expensive products still routinely withhold that level of adjustment, that alone makes it noteworthy.

Comfort

This is the first reason I actually care about the EH11. I typically hate on-ear headphones. I do not mean I have a mild preference against them. Not only do I usually want them off my head almost immediately, I think the world is a worse place for on-ear headphones existing. 

The usual problem is that they press against my fairly compliant pinna flanges and shove that part of the ear super strongly into the side of the head, which causes immediate discomfort.

But the EH11 fits differently; its pads are smaller, and on my head they sit closer to the ear canal entrance instead of landing on the part of my pinna that most on-ears aggravate. 

In practice, that means EH11 doesn't force my ear to bend or shift around much, and that makes them substantially more comfortable for me than most of the on-ear headphones people normally talk about from Koss or Grado.

That is still anatomy-dependent, obviously, but I think it is one of this product's two standout practical advantages. If you're like me and you normally ignore on-ears because of discomfort, this is at least one of the few that may be worth trying.

Design and controls

The visual design is, to put it generously, a choice. I used the pink version, and yes, it looks ridiculous on me. There are other color options, which may help if you are less (or more) interested in looking like your headphone was chosen by a very confident child.

Functionally, though, the controls are pretty sensible. There is a volume wheel on one side and another wheel for track navigation on the other. I also have to admit the main controls have pretty decent “knob feel,” which is an extremely important parameter of headphone performance, I'm sure you'll agree.

The rest of the build here is very basic. It uses translucent plastic, the construction is barebones, and the overall feel is cheap. But still, at $32, I cannot get too uppity about that. It feels low-end because it is low-end, and in context I find it acceptable rather than insulting.

Stock sound

Out of the box, the EH11 is not really enjoyable. 

Looking at the response and, more importantly, hearing it, I get a boost around 3-3.5 kHz that comes across as glare through the mids-to-treble transition and makes things sound a bit clenched & biting. I also hear a peak around 7 kHz, a dip around 4 to 5 kHz, and a somewhat sucked-out midrange character that can make the mids sound a bit hollow.

So in short, the default presentation is glary and a bit harsh. I would not call the stock tuning "good" for sound quality, and I do not think this is one of those cases where a cheap headphone is secretly perfect if only you believe hard enough. It needs work.

Why EQ matters here

Here is the twist, and it is the entire reason I like this thing at all: it is a very good EQ candidate, and it actually gives you all the tools to make use of its capability in that respect. 

I was surprised by how consistent the response was, both in terms of channel matching, as well as positional variation, through most of the frequency response, until the treble of course (where few if any headphones are truly consistent).

That consistency matters because EQ becomes much more useful when the headphone behaves predictably. You are not fighting some wildly unstable possibility machine every time you put it on. Instead, you can make deliberate adjustments and have them actually stick, which, frankly, is not a given, even less so at this price.

Once I dialed it in, the EH11 sounded pretty good to me, and genuinely competitive with headphones that cost hundreds of dollars or even more. If you're new here that may sound absurd, but it's only absurd if we pretend a headphone's factory tuning is the same thing as its performance ceiling. It is not.

And you might say "Okay but I've tried EQ and it didn't sound good to me." Well it sounds like you didn't actually try manual EQ, and instead fell into the trap most people fall into when first experimenting with EQ: thinking that pre-packaged EQ profiles or AutoEQ to a target is going to get you what you want. But honestly? It can just as easily be one of the quickest ways to ruin your experience too.

What I actually mean by EQ here is not merely matching some target curve and hoping for the best. I am talking about tone generation, using a manual sweep to identify the resonances and problem areas on your own head, then adjusting those areas manually to make it sound better. 

For clarification, the goal is not to force everything to be "perceptually flat," as in all frequencies of the tone generator are the same volume. It is to find the major issues that present themselves on the music you actually listen to, like that 3 to 3.5 kHz peak which makes guitars too harsh for me, or the 4-5 kHz dip that causes a bit of soft muffliness on voices. 

App friction

As much as I like that FiiO included parametric EQ, the app itself needs work. The interface is not particularly good, and that means its not quite as frictionless an introduction to EQ as I'd want people using this headphone to have in an ideal scenario.

That is the main caution I would attach to this recommendation. The EH11 is good if you are willing to do the work and make manual adjustments. If you are not, then the mediocre stock tuning and somewhat unintuitive app become much harder to forgive.

I already alluded to this, but I would also strongly recommend avoiding the AutoEQ option. In my view, if you actually want the headphone to sound good on your head, manual adjustment is a considerably better path. AutoEQ might feel convenient, but convenience and accuracy are not the same thing, and this is one of those cases where the shortcut is genuinely not guaranteed to actually produce better results.

Verdict

Being blunt, I probably would not use the EH11 as my regular out-and-about headphone, partly because of how it looks on me, and partly because this is not exactly a premium-feeling "want to use it everyday" sort of object. However, that is separate from whether I think it is good for the right person. 

For the right person, the one who understands the value of EQ, wants something affordable, and doesn't mind the look? This is a pretty excellent offering, as it offers a frankly unusual amount of potential for very little money. But if you expect great stock tuning, polished software, or a build that feels anything other than cheap, this is probably not your headphone.

Still, I'm glad that EH11 exists. A $32 wireless headphone with usable parametric EQ is the sort of thing more companies should be embarrassed not to offer, especially once prices start climbing into the hundreds.