[aeturnum]

It's also the case that people pay for features other than audio quality. Look and feel, comfort, connectivity all influence price. This feels a little like releasing a study saying, "No correlation between car top speed and retail price."

[emodendroket]

That's true, but I would imagine people think that all the expensive headphones have the sound quality part covered.

[lostlogin]

Yes. The amp and speakers in the living room sound much better than the Logitech UE Boom. However the boom just works, avoids the flakey airplay interface, can be carried where I go and sounds good enough. So I bought another one.

[thaumasiotes]

This is noted at the beginning of the piece:

> Research suggests that factors influencing consumers' choice as to which model to purchase are mostly based on wireless functionality (Iyer and Jelisejeva, 2016) and attributes such as shape, design, and comfort (Jensen et al., 2016). Interestingly, sound quality does not seem to be a major attribute for purchase decisions.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

This isn't surprising: the base level sound quality is probably good enough for the vast majority of users, so they don't care about minor differences there.

I worked for an outfit that had a similar problem: we tried differentiating ourselves on quality, only to find out that all customers expected that the vendors in that space already had high quality as the price of entry into the market (a fairly accurate assumption). As a result, they didn't care about "we're better quality than those guys." They cared about "those guys make equipment that's easier to use than yours."

[londons_explore]

My underpowered very cheap car would like to say otherwise...

[TallGuyShort]

But a $75,000 model T Ford from the 1920's wouldn't. When there's no correlation at all you can find a datapoint anywhere you want.