Thursday, December 18, 2014

Here it is| QFX H-251BT - Stereo Bluetooth Headset with MP3 and FM

The QFX Stereo Bluetooth headset was an impulse buy of mine. I like the portability of bluetooth around my home, and sometimes at night I'm up working late and don't want to be a bother to my neighbors; so playing my bluetooth speaker is out of the question. I first saw these QFX headphones when we pulled them out of a shipping tote at Staples, and they weren't on file in the store. We put them into lock-up until they were added, but they never were. Skip ahead to today when not only did they get put onto file, they went on clearance. Amazon sells them for $38, Newegg for $26; I picked them up for about $14 after my 15% off coupon and my employee discount.

The H-251BT headphones by QFX boast 7 hours of music playing time, 300 hours of standby time, auxiliary input, FM tuner, and a microSD card slot for the built-in mp3 player. I can't vouch for the standby time, but everything else so far is working as advertised. The headphones have been on for about 5 hours and still haven't turned off yet, and the FM tuner works as expected; acceptably. The mp3 player works okay, it would be handy if you didn't own a smartphone or tablet that had expandable memory (looking at you Apple and Amazon people), but anyone with another style device is going to find it tedious to only have the ability to skip songs, and not play a specific track.

I tested the auxiliary input using my computer's headphone jack, it works like any other pair of wired headphones. I didn't buy the QFX H-251BT's because I wanted to use them wired, I wanted portability. Here's where the unit actually excels. I have tested them across my smaller sized, 2-story apartment and there wasn't a single instance of them losing signal. The headphones have no problem keeping up with the distance, and all the track skip buttons worked even from the other side of the house.

Aesthetically, they are some of the worst looking headphones I've ever seen. I can't figure out who they were designed for, but they certainly aren't nice to look at; nor will they look good on you when you put them on. If you go walk through the park wearing these people will laugh at you, and probably rightfully so. Don't buy them because they look cool, they don't. They have a really thick, plastic look, maybe they were trying to copy beats; they missed all the marks on design.

I was hoping the H-251BT headphones would be comfortable, but the padding they use on the ear-cups isn't soft and they are just the right size to not fit over my whole ear; meaning they put uneven pressure on the sides of my ears. If the cups had been slightly bigger, the headphones wouldn't sit so far away from your head, and the cups could slip over your ear delivering a better sound and being significantly more comfortable. Unfortunately they aren't bigger and anyone with normal or larger ears is going to find them uncomfortable relatively quick.

The sound coming out of them is okay, there isn't any definitive bass, but the treble isn't overloaded so it still sounds okay. I would say the sound is about on-par with my Microsoft LifeChat LX-3000 headset. They sound exponentially better than my Targus 51EB bluetooth earbuds; it's not even close. My biggest audio complaint is this weird sound they make when no music or anything is coming out of them, and it does it on any mode; but not while music is playing. It's like a really low frequency, but audibly it's loud enough to easily hear. Reminiscent of the sound tapes make in a cassette player between songs or after the tape is over.  Very distracting between tracks, but not enough to hate them.

Overall I think you should probably skip these and go for something slightly pricier. I know you don't get an MP3 player or FM tuner with a pair of iFrogz Coda Forte, or Photive BTH3 bluetooth headphones. I know that the asking price jumps from roughly $30 to around $50, but the difference is noticeable. Save your money for something better, it will be worth it in the long run to wait out another $20.

1 comment:

  1. Hi quick question, I just purchased the same headphones on ebay. I am trying to connect them to my computer by Bluetooth but it says that the driver is missing...Do you have the driver for it? I tried searching online and could not find anything

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