u/MembershipInitial167

Hey y'all, this post is different from what you might usually see on this sub. I'm officially celebrating my 1 year anniversary with these beautiful headphones.

So in may 2025 I wanted headphones that could effectively cancel the immense fan noise that came out of the external fans of my laptop and found the XM5s to be the one but there was an evident problem with them - The Hinges! Everyone in this sub posts about them, curses sony because of them and tells any one wanting to buy them to look for other options. I went against all of that and got it for 300$, unopened, after tax on a sweet deal.

Since then MembershipInitial167 officially had a baby to take care of. What I didn't expect was that my dorm mates were going to ask me to borrow it. I'm not the kinda person that would say no to beloved dorm mates i met just a few months ago and as anyone who did not pay 300$ for a pair of headphones, they made my XM5s go through hell. I've always held them by the headbands, never stretched the hinges, always put them in their cases and all. My dorm mates did the exact opposite, they held them by the earcups putting stress on the 'fragile' hinges, put them on their heads with each earcup facing the opposite of the other and just threw them in their bags without any protection whatsoever. About a month ago, we were in the library with my dormmate(the worst of all), and as always he was wearing my very expensive and fragile XM5 headphones. He was whispering some bs to me(I was genuinely trying to study but he wouldn't stop) and all of a sudden he "felt that the headphones were slipping off his head" and in an "attempt to catch" the almost fallen headphones he launched them 6ft up to the ceiling, i don't even know how that happened it just happened so quick.

They did inevitably come down and with all the horrors I'd been hearing about the hinges I didn't even have the courage to look back at where they fell. How could anyone glance at their baby lying there in cold blood? I'd already given up and was thinking about how I'm going to go back to my cheap, head-hurting 20$ airpods after all these months. My dorm mate picked them up and to my utter surprise the headphones were unscathed. I, obviously, checked the hinges first and they were as good as they were before. Speakers and mics were perfectly normal, even the very sensitive noise cancellation mics were very normal, some would even say better than before lol. And so that was the time I almost lost my 300$ fortune. I've seen dozens of post that have the very similar title template of "I broke my hinges, can they be fixed?" and I wanted this post to be different than the others. I've owned these headphones for a year now and I can definitely say that they are not as flawed as people make them sound, sure, their hinges are undeniably weaker than any other headphone on the market with the same price but this sub makes them look like they're much worse than what they actually are. I don't know if this story belongs to AITAH sub, I just wanted everyone here to learn from me and never lend your very-expensive headphones to your dorm mates. Thank y'all for reading!