>they will talk in terms of money(i.e. 150$ headphones vs 500$ headphones) when talking about audio quality.
Isn't this the same as computer nerds talking about how much they're spending on their graphics card or their motherboard or whatever? I agree with your overall assessment of audiophile nonsense, but higher quality components and manufacturing processes cost money, so there's a limit to how good a $60 pair of headphones will sound (and hold up over time, for that matter) vs a $200 pair. In particular, it's not like folks who care about the quality of their audio equipment are _actually_ fixating on the price itself; brands like Bose are poorly regarded _precisely because_ their headphones have noticeably worse sound quality (and, in my own limited experience, fall apart faster) than the competition at any particular price point.
> Isn't this the same as computer nerds talking about how much they're spending on their graphics card or their motherboard or whatever?
GPUs have measurable performance benefits. Many people tend to buy more expensive parts than they need and there are diminishing returns (justified as "futureproofing"), but at the end of the day you can easily run reproducible benchmarks to determine exactly how much performance you bought.
Audio quality is much more subjective and there's a whole lot of snake oil. You can certainly recognize a higher quality pair of cans to an extent, but price is not necessarily correlated with quality.
I agree but my point is that it doesn't have to be like that and I have distaste towards fixating the overall product experience on the "sound quality per $" metric. Any product that emphasises on anything beyond that metric is talked down and its users are branded as "uneducated suckers". It's impossible to explain that you want a headphone that looks good, is light, can fold, can connect easily etc. They are extremists that prey on balanced products and people like those.
That's why I like what Apple is doing: earphones/headphones designed with overall experience in mind.
Isn't this the same as computer nerds talking about how much they're spending on their graphics card or their motherboard or whatever? I agree with your overall assessment of audiophile nonsense, but higher quality components and manufacturing processes cost money, so there's a limit to how good a $60 pair of headphones will sound (and hold up over time, for that matter) vs a $200 pair. In particular, it's not like folks who care about the quality of their audio equipment are _actually_ fixating on the price itself; brands like Bose are poorly regarded _precisely because_ their headphones have noticeably worse sound quality (and, in my own limited experience, fall apart faster) than the competition at any particular price point.