Mine last year broke in 4 months of use, it took 4 more months to manage to contact them... It was just after reaching their head-fi account that we finally reached a consensus in replacing it, the email support was awful. And while it was nice that they agreed to replace, I still needed to pay 500R$ to ship it to china, and 100 more to get it back, which is more than 30% of the full price.
Seeing this new version just after getting my new pair back is even more disheartening, not because a company is trying to improve their product, but because of how obvious a high stress point being made out of cheap plastic is just probably a company scum strategy. So, by seeing how many people are reporting the issue recently, I fear that AR5000 1 owners are basically holding a clock bomb set to explode at any moment.