What snares a lot of well-meaning music fans into wasting money on audio woo is that the first upgrades can be mind-blowing. Let's stick with headphones for simplicity. Pairing, say, a $400 set with a well-mastered album you've listened to hundreds of times and you'll discover sounds in it you've never noticed before - the singer's breathing, whispered background vocals, a guitar string's squeak. It even feels like each instrument is playing from physically distinct places! If the headphones are wired you might next add a $90 DAC/amp combo and - wow, you really feel the bass and sub-bass now! So what will take you to the next level?

The honest answer is that absolutely nothing will provide improvement like what you've just experienced. Tripling your headphone budget gets you a number of beautiful, well-engineered cans with sound signatures tailored to your favorite sorts of music, but with improvements on the order of "that midrange has more detail, nice" than "holy crap!"

Woo-selling companies target anyone still convinced at that point there is some next, higher level of audio bliss they can reach with the perfect combination of kit. Cables made from exotic materials, fancy power conditioners, rocks and stickers have glowing "reviews" and marketing pseudoscience about sonic transparency and skin effect. They do nothing and give the audiophile industry a bad name, but they'll be with us until suckers stop paying for them.