That's not "market partioning" -- that's utter hostility toward your customers.
Would people feel a lot better if instead they just went and changed the circuitry to produce lower quality sound?
Yes, as long as there was a halfway plausible explanation that it cost less to produce.
If the feature differentiation is achieved by taking the premium offering and adding a component to remove functionality, then that feels a lot worse than taking the mid-range offering and adding components to result in the premium one.
Hardware does have a per-unit manufacturing cost, and people expect a more expensive product to cost more to make.
(Also, FWIW, the "$350" headphones are currently $145 on Amazon and the "$200" ones are $85.)