No there isn't. The audiophile culture could be replaced with a form where you type how much money you have and it gives you the equipment that you are supposed to buy but this is not because of the costs but because the industry taught the market that it must be that way. Often, the difference of sound quality between high end and low end headphones comes from tiny bit of foam.
It's really about branding and market segmentation.
If you're not hearing the difference between 200$ headphones and 50$ ones or even 500$ vs 200$ and think it's foam then there's something wrong with your hearing. Like the parent said the differences get more subtle as you go up the range and at some point it becomes bullshit (gold HDMI cable stuff)
I think the problem is that the music I listen to is mastered so poorly (compression wars) that the more expensive headphones just expose how bad the music sounds rather than make it sound better. Maybe if I changed my taste to enjoy classical music instead of J-pop.
I have a similar problem - I use studio headphones at home mostly but popular music actually sounds worse without EQ. Listening to podcasts however is almost like being in the studio.
I can hear the difference between $200 and $500, but I'm not sure I would say that the $500 sounds better -- or just different. I suspect I'm not alone. But its up to each person to find the right price point for their ears.
I had an interesting experience along these lines. I was in a headphone shop because my old $200 Seinnheiser headphones had fallen apart after many years of use.
I got to compare many different headphones from different manufacturers back-to-back, using my own music that I was familiar with.
Under $200 = garbage.
$200 - $500 = generally good and largely indistinguishable apart from the comfort of the headband and the padding.
I was about to buy a pair of HD600 headphones when for a lark I decided to try the "out of my budget" HD800 headphones. They were $1,500 at the time.
It was like night & day. I couldn't believe it. All other headphones rendered the sound of a double bass in a classical piece as a monotonal "thrum-thrum-thrum". With the HD800 it was like you were standing next to the thing. Every note, even the lowest, clearly distinct. You could hear the scrape of the bow across the strings. In orchestral pieces you could hear every intake of breath and every ruffled page.
Head drooping in defeat, I handed over my credit card and bought it right there. I was ruined. There is no going back.
I ended up re-listening to my entire music collection and re-watching every movie that had decent sound mastering. Some songs made the hair stand up on my arms, they gave me a sense of tingly pleasure they never had before.
It's funny, sometimes better reproduction quality ruins the experience - for example I rewatched some sci-fi movies on my 4K TV in full resolution and the extra detail just brings attention to flaws in effects, it shifts the experience from people in a magical place to actors in front of a green screen.
But everything is objectively better and the experience is better in 95% of the cases.
Likewise for music. When I listen to some music on my studio headphones I get precise sound and more detail, but in the end some music sounds worse than on cheap but loud bass heavy headphones.
But is the higher price necessary or an artificial segmentation of the market? Of course expensive sounds better than cheap, but could $100 headphones sound as good as $500 or are they really that much more expensive to make?
I doubt it - there is plenty of competition in that market. I bought some "no-name" chinese open ears for 50$ with supposedly good drivers - had decent reviews saying they sound above their price - you just needed to replace the horrible ear pads they were decent. But for example my 200$ DT990 are obviously a class above.
The experience is a little like that of photography, I've found. Starting out, you can spend substantial but reasonable amounts for very significant increments in image quality. After a while you hit an inflection point beyond which you'd be spending effectively unbounded amounts in search of just that little extra bit of sharpness or depth of field or so on. The people with the money and urge to climb that curve are very like "serious audiophiles" in my experience, but there's still a range in which you can spend and see a real difference.
My 105mm macro and flash kit cost about a grand, and let me take pictures of hunting wasps from six inches away - something I couldn't do without them. Likewise, the headphones I use let me hear things I otherwise wouldn't. You can get stupid with money for sure in this space, but that doesn't make everything in this space stupid.
No there isn't. The audiophile culture could be replaced with a form where you type how much money you have and it gives you the equipment that you are supposed to buy but this is not because of the costs but because the industry taught the market that it must be that way. Often, the difference of sound quality between high end and low end headphones comes from tiny bit of foam.
It's really about branding and market segmentation.