Tl;dr

I won’t be doing business with Hifiman anymore. And I don’t think you should either.

I had the absolute pleasure in July and August of 2025 of ultimately expending $22.81 out of pocket to spend a full month fighting with Hifiman’s atrocious customer service about a return. They shipped me two faulty units (HE-X4, Sundara Closed), which happens, but then they spent a month giving me a run-around before refunding the headphones (but not the $22.81 I spent sending them back for repair or replacement). Along the way, they 1) lied to me about my headphones being shipped back, 2) tried twice to upsell me to a pricier headphone at a higher cost than they were listed on their website, and 3) disappeared for days at a time with no communication. In the end, it took repeated follow up outside the normal customer service account to get to any kind of resolution. In the end, they sold me an Audivina closed back headphone for the eventually amount refunded for both the Sundara Closed and the HE-X4.¹

Regardless of the quality of their headphones (which is inconsistent at best), I cannot in good conscience recommend anyone buy directly from Hifiman. If you want a pair of their headphones, make sure you buy from a vendor with a good return policy that won’t ever make you deal with Hifiman directly.²

Many of their prices are great. Many of their products are as well. The headache is … not great. Only one person of the (maybe a dozen) many I spoke to actually tried to address my concern and expressed understanding of why I might be frustrated.

Table of Contents:

1. Tl;dr
2. Introduction
3. How did we get here?
4. Longer Story, Longer
   1. I. In Which There is Hope (aka The Beginning)
   2. II. In Which There is Confusion (aka The Reveal)
   3. III. In Which there is Anger (aka Let the Fuckery Commence)
   4. IV. In Which There is Hope and (False?) Offer of Resolution (aka A New Character Appears?)
   5. V. In Which There is Despair (aka The Rise of Reddit?)
   6. VI. In Which There is, Finally, Real Hope (aka Mark Comes Through)
5. Timeline
6. Conclusion

Introduction

I won’t be doing business with Hifiman anymore, and I don’t think you should either. This is a pretty big shift; I have historically been a pretty big fan of many of their headphones.

I own … a lot of headphones. I make a lot of recommendations on headphones, both on Reddit and in real life. I own or have owned Hifiman’s Arya Stealth, Edition XS, HE-X4, HE6se v.2, Sundara, Sundara Closed, and now Audivina, and I’ve spent enough time with some of the others (400se, Arya Organic, Ananda, etc.) to have a strong sense of their strength and weaknesses. I’ve recommended their products a lot, particularly in budget tiers. I’ve reviewed (generally positively³) the Edition XS and Arya Stealth (my favorite objective headphone at the time), and I have in my queue reviews for the HE6se V2, HE-X4, Sundara, and Sundara Closed.⁴ The Edition XS and Arya Stealth are things I have recommend on a weekly basis to people interested in planars, particularly value ones, and the HE6se v2 is increasingly what I point people to who are looking for a planar endgame, or who find the Stealth too harsh (spoiler for the forthcoming review: I love the way they sound, though they’re not for everyone and they’re genuinely a little challenging to drive).

I’m not a Hifiman hater, and I tended to brush off complaints about their customer service as sour grapes. I was wrong. It’s awful. Let me tell you about it.

How did we get here?

The short version is that Hifiman:

1. Sold me a couple of defective products (it happens, whatever).⁵
2. Made me jump through a bunch of hoops before I could return them.⁶
3. Lied to me about them being repaired and shipped back to me.⁷
4. When they couldn’t repair or replace one of the products (it happens, whatever), attempted to upsell me to a more expensive product at a worse price than was published on their website at the time.⁸
5. Held onto the pair they had repaired or replaced for weeks while figuring out if there was anything they could do with the first pair.⁹
6. Stonewalled a request for refund.¹⁰
7. Finally offered me a reasonable resolution, which I accepted.¹¹
8. Disappeared.
9. Refunded me, six weeks after I returned the headphones.¹²
10. And after all that, this was HIFIMANofficial’s final response via Reddit:

This is not an acceptable business practice, and I don’t think I can in good conscience recommend that anyone else risk running into this buzzsaw given the apparent failure rate of Hifiman’s products.¹³

[Update 9/15/25: After additional follow up from me, Hifiman agreed to honor the original offer of resolution for the same amount they refunded me, and the open-box Audivina arrived today and appears to be fully functional.]

Longer Story, Longer

This is an epic tale of customer service failure.¹⁴ I’m going to start with a couple of caveats:

1. I don’t particularly blame any of the individual customer service reps. This isn’t really their fault; it’s clearly their bosses’, though a Customer Service structure where you talk to a different person each time you communicate with them is … not ideal.
2. It’s pretty clear that at least some of the CSRs are not native English speakers; totally fine with that and none of my frustration has to do with that or the language they used to communicate. While I take issue with the content and responsiveness of their messages, I don’t care about grammar or spelling in this context.
3. My issue is with Hifiman’s policies, not the people.¹⁵

With that, my story of (distinctly developed-world) woes:

I. In Which There is Hope (aka The Beginning)

The knock on Hifiman has always been build quality and customer service. I had a pretty good run with build quality, with everything working pretty well right up until the arrival of an open box set of HE-X4. I enjoyed them quite a bit at first, and then it became clear that there was some damage to the left driver that caused an unpleasant buzz at very specific frequencies. Frequencies, it turns out, that pop up in a lot of Massive Attack tracks. I reached out on June 19th to let them know that I was having an issue. They gave me some troubleshooting steps and after I completed them, agreed to do a repair or replacement for me. In the meantime, I’d ordered a Hifiman Sundara Closed¹⁶ that turned out to have a 10-15 dB channel imbalance, so I got them to agree to let me ship both back at once. I shipped both back at my own expensse on July 15, 2025 for $22.81.

On July 23^rd, I received a message from Hifiman that my repaired and/or replaced headphones had been shipped out via UPS, along with a tracking number. Interestingly, the link was to the French language version of the UPS website, but I figured that this was just an oversight or the result of a francophone setting up the mailing. The tracking number wasn’t quite active yet:

I reached out that day to confirm that both pairs were being shipped together, and got the following in response:

I was pretty pleased. Excellent, reasonably timed service. I was looking forward to getting back to the enjoyable HE-X4 AND experiencing the bizarre Sundara Closed tune without one ear being wildly louder.
I was such a sweet, sweet summer child back then.

II. In Which There is Confusion (aka The Reveal)

Five days later, on July 28, I thought to check the status of my headphones, only to discover that UPS was still waiting for shipment.¹⁷ I reached out to Hifiman to ask for an update, and they told me that they would check with their warehouse to find out what the holdup was.

 A couple of days later, with no response, I followed up and got this response:

Not ideal, but fine. It’s an unusual model, and Hifiman has a bunch of products that I was interested in, so I was open to this route. At this point, I was still pretty fine with the customer service I’d received. Sometimes products are out of stock, and the HE-X4 was an odd model that appears to be out of production. I was confused as to why they’d told me they were being shipped back to me, but I was open to a solution that would have made me whole. I really liked the HE-X4 overall, but this was my (still polite, but bemused) response¹⁸:

Oh you sweet, sweet summer child, end-of-July Phil.

Whatever. Hifiman makes some interesting stuff that I wouldn’t pay full price for, but if they were offering favorable pricing on open-box or refurbs to make it right, I was game. They asked me what products I might be interested in, and after a little surfing:

III. In Which there is Anger (aka Let the Fuckery Commence)

The next day, Hifiman got back to me with some options:

Great, right? Surely they’re offering me the favorable pricing they mentioned. Afterall, these prices are somewhere between $44-54 off of the prices listed on their website.¹⁹

So young and naïve then.

The problem is that these prices were contingent on giving up the HE-X4 that I’d already paid $79 for, meaning the actual effective cost of those options were the listed prices plus $79. For example, the open-box Sundara was listed for $219 on the web on August 2^nd. Between the $165 price Hifiman offered me and giving up the $79 pair of HE-X4, in effect, I would have paid $244 for an item they were then selling at $219. It was worse for some of the other options: on the Audivina, then listed at $599, they wanted $555 + my $79 HE-X4, making it $30 more expensive than just buying the Audivina up front.

The prices the offered weren’t unreasonable if I were trying to upgrade a fully-functioning pair of headphones or I wanted to swap for a pricier option. When offered as part of a replacement for a faulty unit, it’s pretty straightforward upselling. Smells … unfair and deceptive to me. And that’s more or less what I said to them. This, on August 2nd, was the first time I mentioned wanting a refund if they were unable to repair or replace the headphone I ordered:

In response, Hifiman promised to confer with their colleagues and get back to me. And three days later, they did:

For those of you keeping score at home, this was … an additional $10 off each model, making it slightly less of an upsell, but still an upsell. But, an upsell with an offer of a $20 off coupon on a future purchase!²⁰,²¹

Obviously, I declined. At this point, on August 10^th, I was done dealing with Hifiman customer service and I asked them to refund both the HE-X4 and the Sundara Closed they’d never actually sent back to me²²:

[In retrospect, I probably should have asked them to also refund the $23 I spent shipping them their faulty products back for non-repair and replacement. I didn’t. I’m pretty sure they’d have ignored it, but I should have asked.]

Hifiman’s response to my relatively reasonable comments?

“Sorry, not sorry, that’s the best price we can offer. But we’ll totally swap you out your HE-X4 for the HE400se you elected not to buy in the first place!”

Now, there’s nothing wrong with the 400se; it’s reasonably well reviewed and by all reports has a pretty similar sound signature to the X4; BUT it’s a different style of yoke, and one that I don’t usually find very comfortable. There’s a reason I picked the X4 when I ordered, and it wasn’t the $10 price difference. In response, I reiterated my desire to have both the HE-X4 and the Sundara Closed refunded. On August 12^th, Hifiman responded that they were working on it internally:

This was the last communication I got from customerservice@hifiman.com, other than a brief response on August 15^th acknowledging that I’d asked for an update.

IV. In Which There is Hope and (False?) Offer of Resolution (aka A New Character Appears?)

On August 18^th, almost a month after I shipped my headphones back to Hifiman, I got an e-mail from a person named “Mark.”²³ It was a surprisingly hope-inducing e-mail; acknowledging that I was reasonably unhappy with this series of events:

Honestly? This would have been a fine resolution. At this point I wasn’t getting any traction from customerservice@hifiman.com, and while the Audivina is a WEIRD headphone I was totally fine with taking it in lieu of the unrepairable X4 and Sundara Closed. I responded, succinctly, that that would be fine.  

Unfortunately, that was the last time I heard from Mark (until I reached out again a few weeks later).

V. In Which There is Despair (aka The Rise of Reddit?)

I am, for better or worse, a frequent respondent on Reddit, particularly in r/HeadphoneAdvice, a subreddit where I have been actively recommending a number of Hifiman products for quite a while. A few weeks ago, I commented on a thread about how poor my Hifiman customer service had been and someone at u/HIFIMANofficial noticed and reached out, asking me to shoot them a direct message. I did so, and lo and behold, on August 21, I received this message on Reddit:

A day later (August 22) the refunds showed up in Paypal, and eventually the funds returned to my account. Hifiman did not, and did not offer to, refund the $22.81 I spent sending their faulty headphones back to them to start a month-long runaround in customer service purgatory.

VI. In Which There is, Finally, Real Hope (aka Mark Comes Through)

On August 28, I made one last attempt to get Hifiman to do something, anything, to try to make this whole sordid affair not just a waste of my time in which I end up out more than $20 with nothing to show for it. I freely acknowledge that this was not the most polite e-mail I have ever sent, but honestly at this point … I don’t think it was unreasonable.

Mark responded the next day, offering to proceed with a manual payment for the Audivina. After confirming the total they refunded me, he directed Customer Service to process a manual payment for $160 and ship me an open-box Audivina. Awesome, right?

By now, you know where this is going. Radio silence from Customer Service despite an attempt by me to get them to respond.

On September 3rd, I followed up with Mark again, and he finally got Customer Service to respond. Great, right? Again, you know where this is going. Here’s what customer service had to say:

“Sorry, we can’t sell you that headphone at that price!” Joy. At least they did follow up with Mark, and the next day set up the manual payment after he explained (as I did, via e-mail response). I made the payment on September 5th and sent Customer Service the order number. On September 8th, I got a UPS notification that they’d received a package for me, delivery estimated for September 15th. The headphone actually arrived today and appears to be in excellent working order.

Timeline

Here’s a timeline of the whole affair:

• June 16^th: Received HE-X4
• June 19^th: Communicated HE-X4 issue to Hifiman
• June 26^th: Received Sundara Closed
• July 14^th:
  • Confirmed troubleshooting steps on HE-
  X4
  • Communicated Sunara issue to Hifiman
• July 15^th: Shipped headphones to Hifiman
• July 21^st: Hifiman received headphones
• July 23, 2025:
  • Hifiman reported shipping headphones back
  • Confirms it’s both pairs
• July 31: Hifiman admits it did not ship headphones, and can’t in fact repair or replace the HE-X4 and asks if I’d be willing to upgrade
• August 1, 2025: I tell Hifiman which models I’m interested in
• August 2, 2025: Hifiman tries to upsell me at a higher price than their store
• August 2^nd: I point out that it’s an upsell, and ask for a refund for the HE-X4
• August 5, 2025: Hifiman tries to upsell me again, but slightly less, and offers me a $20 coupon for a future purchase.
• August 10^th: I decline the second upsell and ask for a refund for both
• August 11^th:  
  • Hifiman offers to swap out the HE400se for the HE-
  X4
  • I decline and ask for a refund on both.
• August 12:
  • Hifiman tells me they’re consulting a supervisor.
  • Last communication from Customer Service.
• August 19^th:
  • Mark offers an Audivina: August 19^thI accept the Audivina: August 19^th
  • Hifiman issues the refund for both
• August 20: Funds appear in Paypal.
• August 28: I reach out to Mark one final time.
• August 29:
  • Mark responds, suggesting that Customer Service didn’t know what was going on and offering to sell the Audivina to me for the amount refunded for the Sundara Closed & HE-X4 ($160).
  • I accept.
  • Mark contacts Customer Service.
• September 2: I follow up with Customer Service.
• September 3: I folloow up with Mark.
• September 4:
  • Mark pings Customer Service again.
  • Customer Service reaches out, tells me Mark told them I wanted to buy an Audivina and asked for more information about what I want.
  • I tell Hifiman what Mark offered me (an open box Audivina for $160; the amount Hifiman refunded me for the Sundara Closed and HE-X4).
  • Hifiman responds that the Audivina cannot be purchased for $160, but will follow up with Mark.
• September 5:
  • Hifiman confirms that they can, in fact, sell me the Audivina for $160 given the circumstances.
  • I make payment via the portal.
• September 8: Audivina shipped.
• Septermber 15: Audivina received.

Conclusion

So, some fun final stats:

• Days Hifiman had possession of my headphones before they refunded me: 29
• Days Hifiman had my headphones before the (eventual) replacement arrived: 56
• Days Hifiman took to issue a refund after I asked: 18 (HE-X4), 10 (Sundara Closed)
• Days Hifiman took to admit that they had not, in fact, shipped my headphones back to me after providing a tracking number (and that they couldn’t repair or replace one): 8
• Days Hifiman did not communicate with me before finally issuing a refund: 7
• Amount I’m out of pocket (shipping the return/replacement): $22.81.

This is not the behavior of a company that is either competent or stands behind their products. The only effort to make this right came at the very end from Mark, and required substantial and repeated follow-up from me. Even then, after we came to an agreement, Customer Service still told me they couldn’t do what we had a greed to until they followed up with Mark again. While I am pleased so far with the Audivina (and I got it at a price substantially below the best Customer Service told me they could do), the reason they were willing to make that deal was that they’re a pretty universally panned pair of headphones in the audiophile community, continually on deeper and deeper discounts (and with a new version recently released).

This is a particularly frustrating situation because I’m not sure there’s anything I could have done differently; I diligently reported an issue when I discovered it. I did the trouble shooting that Hifiman suggested, and with the HE-X4 I even spent a month trying to see if I could live with it before deciding it really did need repair. The Sundara Closed was a much more direct issue, with no reasonable expectation that I could try to live with it.

I’m not upset that the products were faulty. It’s an inevitable part of any manufacturing process.²⁴ I’m not upset that they couldn’t repair or replace a specific model; that also happens, particularly with product lines at or past their end of life date. What I do find unacceptable, and are, in fact, corporate choices, are:

• Poor communication, particularly telling me that the headphones had shipped back to me (with confirmation a tracking numnber) when they had not (and in fact, could not be)
• The attempt, twice, to upsell me to a more expensive product at a price higher than advertised on their webstore.²⁵
• Finally making an effort to make it right, only to disappear in favor of an incomplete refund.
• Not covering the $22.81 I spent sending their faulty products back to them, just to kick off a month in customer service hell.

Particularly once escalation occured, there should have been a single person assigned to process this transaction, or at least some internal notation system so that I didn’t have to continually explain the series of events that lead to the situation. Customer service also clearly has some scripts and prescribed behavior; if you look at the e-mails re: swapping products, they’re pretty clearly using a script designed for voluntary replacements where a customer wants to trade-in a product for a more expensive product, rather than a situation where Hifiman is unable to provide a replacement and thus needs to make a better offer. That’s a choice, or a lack of planning.

These are all things that can be pretty easily and reasonably mitigated or avoided, and that many of their competitors are doing much better at. They’re a choice Hifiman is making. And that’s not what a company I want to do business with does.

I’m still going to provide honest feedback and recommendations for headphones when asked, but I’m also going to be really clear that purchasing directly from Hifiman may lead to poor outcomes.

---

1. This is not, like, ideal, but better than just being out $23 with nothing to show for it. The Audivina is a … unpopular closed back, which is why a $1999 MSRP headphone is selling on Hifiman’s website right now for $700 ($500 open box); this is almost certainly why they were willing to give it to me in lieu of the two headphones I’d actually bought. That said, the HE6se V.2 is also a $1899 headphone selling for under $400, and I really, really like the way they sound. ↩︎
2. Personally, I like Headphones.com though you really need to read the fine print on anything you’re buying from them; a surprisingly large amount of their inventory is not subject to the generous one year return policy they advertise. Though I prefer supporting more specialized retailers, Amazon has a pretty good return policy too. ↩︎
3. Though I’ll be updating the reviews to reflect this experience. ↩︎
4. For obvious reasons, probably won’t be doing the HE-X4 or the Sundara Closed now. ↩︎
5. HE-X4 and Sundara Closed. [I know. Believe me, I know.] ↩︎
6. Not in and of itself a problem; they should have people do some troubleshooting before accepting returns. The problem is the days it takes them to respond to each communication. ↩︎
7. Including providing a shipping label number to track, and confirming via e-mail that BOTH pairs had been shipped. ↩︎
8. Twice. They did it twice. The second time after I explained to them why their “favorable” pricing wasn’t actually favorable. ↩︎
9. They never explained why the Sundara Closed didn’t get mailed out at any time between July 23 and present. ↩︎
10. 18 and 10 days from ask to refund for the HE-X4 and Sundara Closed, respectively. ↩︎
11. Ideal? No. But acceptable. ↩︎
12. They didn’t tell me they were doing it; I found out via a Reddit DM. ↩︎
13. I own or have owned six Hifiman headphones, two of which were faulty out of the box. ↩︎
14. When I say longer, I mean LONGER, and for very pedestrian values of epic. ↩︎
15. Except the executives who inculcate and perpetuate this culture. They suck. ↩︎
16. Yeah, I know they’re not a great headphone. I was curious to see how bad they were, plus apparently you can swap the headband from the Sundara to the HE6se that I love. ↩︎
17. And they’re still waiting, more than a month later. ↩︎
18. I didn’t catch this at the time, but it’s worth noting that that link appears to take you to a regular, voluntary upgrade site, rather than one specific for situations where repairs or replacement are not possible for errors caused by Hifiman. ↩︎
19. Not including, of course, the 10% sale that they were running (and have been running, in one form or another, basically since December of ’25). ↩︎
20. Because I would totes be eager to potentially re-enter consumer service hell again. ↩︎
21. Also, this is the only time they ever offered any compensation for all the fuckery. ↩︎
22. I’ll also freely admit I started getting snippy here; I’m not *proud* of it but I’m also not particularly ashamed. This was … spectacularly bad customer service for a company mostly selling relatively high-end products. ↩︎
23. My first experience with a named Hifiman e-mail account, rather than the generic customer service account. ↩︎
24. Though it appears to happen more often for Hifiman than for some of their competitors … ↩︎
25. The second one was particularly galling, seeing as how I had already explained why the first time was bad. ↩︎