100% agree on the price. Especially with headphones. When it comes to speakers, some of the most expensive and exotic designs are nothing more than hype. Modern technology and manufacturing had enabled those with the most limited budgets to enjoy very high quality systems for a low price. There are really good speakers in the under $500 range that could outperform speakers costing 4x as much. Think back to the infinity primus series. Obviously, all budget speakers will require cost cutting measures, but it's where that cost cut comes from that determines the quality. Likewise, a pair of speakers costing 20k may have exotic wood veneers, which add 1000s to the price tag, but nothing to the sound quality.
Headphones are another story. Looking at response graphs and distortion measurements of headphones on headroom, one will quickly find the pricier "audiophile grade" headphones perform much worse than a pair of well designed studio headphones. I'm fairly certain several companies will also use the exact same components for more expensive models, yet charge a higher price, Grado comes to mind. Several of their headphones use identical drivers, and display identical frequency response curves, but might have bigger ear cups, nicer wood, etc.
Expensive amplifiers, marketed with brochures filled with useless terminology, expensive DACs, or worse, "magic" USB cables to connect them, are everywhere.
With modern solid state amps, and digital recording/playback mediums, the major determining factor in sound quality is the speakers themselves. The cheapest laptop DAC paired with the lousiest op-amp will sound exactly the same so long as it has an acceptable SNR and it isn't driven into distortion.
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Broadly agree except the part about "the most expensive and exotic designs are nothing more than hype". It doesn't work in economics*, but it does work for loudspeaker technology, those exotic designs do trickle down to lower tier models, so that eventually you do find $500 speakers that perform extremely well.**
You can't evaluate headphones based on response graphs ... distortion, maybe. Nobody knows what the ideal frequency response of a headphone should be ... not even the well established manufacturers like Sennheiser, AKG, Harmon group companies, Beyer Dynamic, etc. The driver-to-eardrum interface is more complex than the loudspeaker-room interface, and is more variable listener-to-listener than your typical speaker-to-room (they're mostly boxes, for one. Major dimension relationships can be assumed right there; not so with millions of unique ears). You even have an inner ear canal that adds 3rd harmonic distortion to everything you hear.
You have to wear them and see what you think. Like loudspeakers, headphone technology trickles down well, and has had incredible attention in the last decade, so the $200 pair of today bears no resemblance to the $200 pair of 2007. We win, in the end, which is what we want, right? ***
*Economics Major
** The one thing you don't get with inexpensive speakers is much in the way of cabinet resonance control; a lot of the options are too expensive at that price point, especially since every brace adds weight, which weighs heavily in the cost to move boxes across the country or between countries. Shipping in an inexpensive speaker can be more than 50% of the wholesale cost. Drivers and crossovers (to an extent) do make it into these products, however.
*** Although not a strict rule, it's useful enough to be worth remembering. Audio is about subtle improvements ... after all a $80 BluTooth speaker doesn't sound terrible. You can get useful sound with a pair of $3 TV speakers and a $10 chipamp, which is what you find in most TVs, after all. But, for High Sound Quality, each subtle incremental improvement probably doubles the cost. So when you get to improving a $2000 component, you probably have to spend $4000. Which gets pretty expensive at the top tier of devices.
