Griffin Tunebuds review

There’s a lot of competition in the cheap earphone market, mostly because a whole lot of people think it’s crazy to spend more than £30 on earphones. The Griffin Tunebuds have a job on their hands then, but their £15 price tag is alluring, especially when you can knock a few quid off that figure if you shop around online.

They’re of a simple IEM design, including three sets of rubber seals, small, medium and large, along with a small pouch to keep the earphones stored in.

As with any IEM earphone, the important thing is to get the seal right in your ear. The rubber ends supplied aren’t of the best quality, being slightly less comfortable and easy to fit those supplied with rival Sennheiser earphones.

Once you do get the things in properly though, the Tunebuds offer bass levels that are genuinely surprising considering their cost, supplying a proper thud to bass drum beats that most bundled headphones can’t hope to achieve.

The treble is just as keen as the bass, and there’s a tendency for the Tunebuds to sound harsh as the higher frequencies take on a spiky and sibilant quality, lacking the smoothness of more expensive or capable earphones. In between the fun bass and the slightly fatiguing treble, there’s not much room for the mids to survive. Although the resulting sound isn’t terribly warm, the powerful bass response makes the Tunebuds a decent sonic upgrade for those looking for a more forceful sound than that supplied by their bundled earphones.

However, they probably won’t be much of an upgrade in build quality terms. The Tunebuds are light and very plasticky, and there’s a disconcerting crackling noise emitted from somewhere inside them as you put them in your ears. We’d have much preferred it if Griffin had ditched the bundled pouch and spent a few more pennies making sure that the earphones themselves could survive more than a day in the average person’s jacket pocket.

These headphones may be cheap, but they don’t sound it. The Tunebuds have a level of bass to rival the much-loved Sennheiser CX300s, although the overactive treble is a bit hard on the ears for prolonged listening. The build quality disappoints more significantly though, with awkward rubber seals and other signs that reveal where the penny-pinching corners have been cut. They look fine, but we’re concerned about how long they’d actually last before ending up in headphone heaven.