> people are willing to pay more for better sound, better noise cancelling

> The cost of something doesn't always correlate with the technology, components, and material

Doesn't this actually contradict what you claimed originally, though?

This is false equivalence. You're describing the luxury market, a vertical that is built on decoupling the raw material cost from the price tag. And in reality it is more nuanced than just raw material as there is a lot of cost in r&d/marketing/operations etc. Nevertheless, products targeted to general consumers are much more sensitive to that deviation.