Aurvana X-fi Headband cracking

[Tallulah]

I received my headphones for christmas last year, and have been more than satisfied with them. The sound is great and they make travelling much more enjoyable with the effective noise cancelling, and with comfortable wear. However, the plastic on the headband is cracking. Slowly over the past several months, cracks have begun appearing and spreading during normal use (putting them on and removing them). For the most part, they've been small and I've ignored them. However in the past week they reached a breaking point and spread rapidly, to the point I no longer want to put them on for fear of them breaking.

[Lon]

Hello I am having same problem. I emailed their customer support and they claim that it's caused my physical abuse and they want to charge me $240 to repair it. This was extremely surprising. First off, the damage is not due to mistreatment. I take as much care of these headphones as I do my laptop, if they're not on my head, they're either in the hard case, or sitting on my desk, and to charge me nearly the full price of the headphones to repair something that is clearly a defect in the headphones. I'm quite disappointed.

[Aandaleeb]

I was looking in the internet about a good, effectively noise cancelling headphone. The NC is the most important figure. My inner choice came upon the Panasonic RP-HC500 and the Creative Aurvana X-Fi. Other brands, Bose, Sennheiser and Sony, are far beyond my budget. Through several postings in the internet I have learned now, both of said models suffer from serious mechanic-design problems. Both models tend to fall apart after some time after buy. The Creative Aurvana X-Fi is very famous for its cracking headband which is unrepairable in an economical sense.

[Tallulah]

I noticed last week that the black plastic part on the left side of my Aurvanna X-Fi noise-canceling head set is about to fall apart. This is the part that serves as a sheath for the metal headband to extend from and retract to, and is attached to a wish-bone looking bracket that is holding the actual left headphone. I emailed Creative support last week, inquiring about how to get this part replaced. The part has two screws in it, and it looks like it can be easily replaced. I was hoping that Creative would ship me the part (for a reasonable price) so that I can replace it and continue using my $300 headset. Unfortunately, Creative emailed me back saying that "due to the shortage of parts" they could not send me the part, and neither could they repair the set. So, they suggested that I just buy a new one.

[Chaska]

I have not once dropped this headset. I always store it in its case, and that is probably the reason why the plastic sheath is about to fall apart. Had I not been extending and retracting the headband every time I used this headset, it would probably have lasted longer. The headset looks perfect other than this one part being cracked and about to come completely apart. I am done with Creative. I will never buy anything again from this company. I do not want to go into detail, but when I purchased their Aurvanna X-Fi, I had to have it replaced five times (not kidding!) within the first three months due to various issues related to its electronics. By the way, the original warranty on this set was three months.

[Lon]

I'm glad to find out that I'm not the only one having this problem. I have three of these headphones and all of them have the exact same cracking issue. I bought two sets for my sons about a year ago and one for myself just before we left for vacation two months ago. One of my sons discovered while packing for our flight that his headband was cracked. The second headband cracked during the trip and mine finally gave up about a week later. I can say with certainty that not one of these sets were abused. This is obviously a design flaw due to a poor choice of plastic used in the cover. It looks as if the repair would be trivial if Creative would just supply repair parts.

[heyou]

Last weekend, i noticed the same issue happening to my set of aurvana headphone. And interesting enough, it was the left side that was having this issue. I don't care about having their warranty handle it. I just need to find a place that sell replacement part for this to fix my headset. Does anyone know a place that would sell this?

Thanks,
Heyou