Hahahaha. I love China stories. Been here 10 years and its still the same. Read 'Mr. China' by Tim Clissold. Its about how a wall street banker blew $418M in China in the early nineties.
Darkstar, you should know better. Check all products when you pay for them. There's distributors, official retailers, and unofficial/shuihuo retailers. Its a retailer problem, not a distributor problem.
If you bought through unofficial channels like most people do for the lower price, there's absolutly nothing you can do except go back to that retailer and argue with them for 8 hours, disrupt their business and try to get them to pay up. I ran a department store before, the disrupting their business bit works well
Make a big scene, get people to crowd up and block their booth/store front. The quieter way is to stand next to them for a day and tell every customer that approaches not to buy them here.
Unlikely you purchased from the distributor, as they don't sell directly to customer the last time I checked. So, if you got it at an official retailer, take your phones and receipt back and argue with them for 8 hours, disrupt their business and try to get them to pay up. Because they'll say, they sold you a pair of headphone and YOU broke them. (If they're nice retailers, you can always try the polite method, explain exactly what happened, and hope that they'll exchange a new pair for you.)
If the official retailor doesn't pay up, then all you can do is file an official complaint with Artsound about the retailer and try to force them to cancel their retail agreement. Highly unlikely to succeed unless you get 100 other people to do the same.
Artsound is not going to help you out. Broken head bands aren't exactly covered under warantee. You can state that when you opened the box, the phones were already broken, but you can't PROVE it. Its not that they don't have customer service (service actually is pretty good compared with other local distributors), its that they get so many calls/emails/letter/visits from unscrupulous people with broken stuff trying to get a free replacement that almost all warrantee issues are ignored. Warantee issues channelled through an official retailer WILL get a response...if you can make the retailer get off his lazy butt to make a phone call.
Its like buying a light bulb in the supermarket. The bulb sockets are there for you to test out the bulbs and make sure it works before you purchase it. Trying to return a non-working bulb is an exercise in frustration.
