"Interestingly, sound quality does not seem to be a major attribute for purchase decisions." This is a silly assumption, and easily explained. 1. Most headpho

"Interestingly, sound quality does not seem to be a major attribute for purchase decisions." This is a silly assumption, and easily explained. 1. Most headphone purchases aren't and cannot be made by comparing sound quality. Reviews of sound quality are so universally understood to be subjective that most consumers probably ignore those details. 2. There is no one subjective or objective standard that is meaningful for all listening material. Podcasts, modern pop music, older pop music, classical recordings, television shows, and movies all have wildly varying acoustic profiles between and among each genre. 3. The vast majority of headphones have Good Enough sound quality for the vast majority of consumers. Sound quality is highly unlikely to be the primary reason most consumers buy a set of headphones, and it's unlikely to be the reason they are dissatisfied with certain headphones. 4. Headphone design, form factor, build quality, fit, feature-set, and even color are all much more important factors in terms of consumer satisfaction with headphones. They are, after all, a highly noticeable part of your ensemble. They are intimately in contact with your body. And you want them to work without thinking about it too hard. In addition to being more important, most of these factors are far easier for consumers to judge between headphones than sound quality, so again it's no surprise that an arbitrary single standard of sound quality would fail to correlate with perceived value. In other words, this is silly for reasons that have nothing to do with technical arguments about actual sound quality, whatever that means.