Hello everyone,
I live in India, and after several months of research, and thanks to the fantastic community at Head-Fi including |joker|, ClieOS and Techno Kid and everyone in this thread, settled on the R-50. I managed to acquire them via a friend holidaying in and returning from the US. I received them in hand about a month after the original date of order, and man, I LOVED them. The sound was everything I'd hoped for as a musician and person working in music production and engineering - accurate, close to neutral in overall tonality, incredibly detailed and with a great well-rounded soundstage. I loved them, until I discovered a connection issue right out of the box.
During that evening of intermittent listening, I put them on to suddenly discover absolutely NO sound from the left earpiece. I panicked and tried locating the possible cause, and finally traced it to left earpiece cabling, presumably within the earpiece housing itself. The general problem area appears to be the section of the cable going to the left earpiece through the memory wire. Fiddling with the wiring and gently pushing it inwards into the housing entrance temporarily solves the problem, but the connection seems to fall loose again in minutes. All this was within minutes of me opening the box, and I'm absolutely positive this is a manufacturing defect, possibly a loose solder joint.
Interestingly, ClieOS' review of the R-50 suggests that the point of entry of the cable into the earpiece housing appears to be delicate and should be handled with care. And I'm positive that in the hour or two that I used the R-50, I handled them as gently and carefully as I can imagine, especially the entire memory wire section, which seemed and looked delicate and potentially problematic to me the moment I opened the box.
In addition, I feel this is something of a design flaw - the memory wire section being designed to be used as earguides, as this obviously encourages twisting of the cable at that section, and possible tugging of the cable at the solder points inside the housing. But I know not everyone will agree with me on this point.
Being in India and without much financial means, I cannot afford to send these back to Rock It Sounds in the US to claim warranty - and the warranty terms include a 25$ return fee, along with the shipping of the product to the company in the first place, which in total will overall amount to almost half the original value of R-50 in the first place.
Can anyone advise me on what I could do to solve this, or how I could handle this situation with Rock It Sounds, or how I could attempt to fix this? Again, I am POSITIVE that this is a manufacturing defect, as I used them at my desk for a total of about 20 minutes of listening time, and absolutely babied them in every possible way, handling the memory wire section with almost ridiculous gentleness. This connection problem showed itself right out of the box, the sound dropping in and out depending on the angle of the earpiece in my ear and the memory wire around my ear.
