As far as experience with HiFiMan...
I do have a Jade HE1.3 that hasn't had any problems and sounded great while I had an electrostatic amp. But when I bought the HE-5 and EF-5, the HE-5 was horribly bright, and then developed a crack after a month, while the EF-5 developed a bad connection in the headphone jack. I sent them back, but they lost my order after receipt. After a month and a half I got them back, and the HE-5 now sounded very different with the new pad they put in it to tame the highs. It still doesn't sound really good, and a few months later they came out with the LE version.
Yeah, I know you take your risks buying a v1.0 release of just about anything, and I'm a little more careful now. I waited until now to get an LCD-2, despite all the hype.
Not to say Audeze is a lot better with their own quality problems and design changes within a revision, etc. But I personally don't feel they try to rush things out the door and let the customers be the beta testers, as I feel HiFiMan has done. But this is all just my biased opinion, and I realize there are bad experiences from just about every manufacturer out there.