Some Headphones Amplify Celebrities Over Sound

This excellent New York Times article summarizes the trend of branded, often celebrity-endorsed headphones you see all over busses and college campuses these days. Celebrity endorsements, attractive visual design, and extensive marketing all serve to drive up demand and get consumers to pay hundreds of dollars for headphones with a decidedly cheaper sound. The main purpose of headphones is to reproduce sound, and sacrificing this goal for peripheral ones like style is, to me, a poor trade. If you want to wear something cool-looking on your head, get a nice hat.