> 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.
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.