&gt; Good headphones only bring marginally better sound over mediocre ones for most of the source material and format people hear<p>I have to disagree here. Perhaps it&#x27;s just me, but when I listen to my music downloaded from iTunes over crappy headphones, then over my good headphones, there is a tremendous difference. I can hear synth beats, quiet drum hits, vocal inflections, and guitar riffs on the good headphones which are lost to the muddled and over-driven bass in bad headphones.<p>And this is with recent music by Taylor Swift, Adelle, and Avicci.<p>&gt; Appearance matters.<p>Thankfully, companies like Sennheiser have started to make tremendous leaps in these qualities. Of course, they&#x27;re starting to drive up their prices as well, so that&#x27;s a bit of a backslide...<p>&gt; So optimize what&#x27;s actually important to you<p>Agreed. Though it wouldn&#x27;t hurt to expose folks to more good sounding headphones, so they can make a decision on actual data. If I didn&#x27;t have headroom in my home town, I wouldn&#x27;t know what truly good headphones would sound like; my experience would have been limited to Boise and Beats.