I dunno. I think headphones track price-to-quality pretty well in the $20-250 range. Above that, it starts turning into luxury/status symbol stuff. This is my completely subjective opinion. What isn't opinion is that increases in quality are usually a matter of diminishing returns. It becomes increasingly expensive to get increasingly small incremental improvements.
Additionally, I think "sound quality" in headphones is very subjective. There are fine quality headphones that I really, really dislike (Grados, for example). I find a lot of expensive hi-fi headphones overly bright, too.
A good price/performance example is two headphones I keep around... my Beyerdynamic 880s, which I love, and the Sennheiser HD280. The 880s cost about twice as much, and fill the same role for me - closed-ear phones with very strong isolation, for performers tracking vocals or instruments. They can put a loud backing signal into the ear with only minimal leakage into the microphones, and easily block out other loud instruments in the same room. But the 880 sounds far better. It's flatter and more detailed. It's also much more comfortable for extended wear, better built, and more repairable. That's the $100 to $200 difference. But $200 to $400? Smaller change.
Fundamentally, there is nothing in the sound of a headphone other than specific spectral response (for a given head fit and ear). If you have an "ideal" headphone, you can emulate any headphone which is less than ideal.
If well-recorded music sounds bad on an ideal headphone, the recording is set up for a non-ideal headphone.
You'll notice in those response curves, there are common characteristics in the response of almost all the headphones they tested, within a fairly small margin (considering). Maybe for a mastering technician, the right thing to do is master for the average suboptimal headphone, and not for a linear response listening instrument; but that doesn't mean a headphone closer to the ideal is wrong, it just means that you need to filter audio that wasn't intended for its response profile.
I dunno. I think headphones track price-to-quality pretty well in the $20-250 range. Above that, it starts turning into luxury/status symbol stuff. This is my completely subjective opinion. What isn't opinion is that increases in quality are usually a matter of diminishing returns. It becomes increasingly expensive to get increasingly small incremental improvements.
Additionally, I think "sound quality" in headphones is very subjective. There are fine quality headphones that I really, really dislike (Grados, for example). I find a lot of expensive hi-fi headphones overly bright, too.
A good price/performance example is two headphones I keep around... my Beyerdynamic 880s, which I love, and the Sennheiser HD280. The 880s cost about twice as much, and fill the same role for me - closed-ear phones with very strong isolation, for performers tracking vocals or instruments. They can put a loud backing signal into the ear with only minimal leakage into the microphones, and easily block out other loud instruments in the same room. But the 880 sounds far better. It's flatter and more detailed. It's also much more comfortable for extended wear, better built, and more repairable. That's the $100 to $200 difference. But $200 to $400? Smaller change.