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Comment by noonespecial | Hacker News Reader

This is classic market segmentation. The R&D costs are sunk, the marginal cost is low, there's only so many people who will buy the things for $350. If only we could sell some for $150 without pissing off the people who paid $350 or doing a whole new R&D cycle, there's lots of people who'd buy them for $150.

The real question that they should be asking is should they have just sold them all for $150 and not risked the bad PR? They may have sold enough at the lower price for it to come out a wash, and not be embarrassed by something like this.

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"not risked the bad PR"

The risk was minimal. Everybody does it. The odds of them getting targeted weren't significant, given the pool of possible targets. You could spend every hour of every day cataloging all the places this occurs. And this still is yet to be a big deal, even.

(Please note that when I say everybody does it, I mean simply that everybody does it, no more, no less. I'm not passing judgment about the virtues or lack thereof. It's just the truth. Oh, and everybody doesn't literally mean every single person, but this is a well-established meaning of the term.)

Everybody does do, but audiophiles are a tricky bunch to market to. Stuff like this really gets their attention. If they found out that they could buy their $350 headphones for $150, they might not buy either because they're "not expensive enough to sound good."

It could turn out well for them; all these people thinking they are hacking the system to pay $150 and save $200 when in fact both sets are actually worth $15 or less.

I'll bet none of them could tell the difference between with foam and without foam, either.

I doubt this is true. See those holes near the bottom / on the back of your computer speakers? Play some music and shove your thumb in them while it's playing. You'll hear the difference.

Air needs to move for sound to exist, even in the direction away from your ear. If stuff's in the way, the sound's going to be muffled.

There is a huge difference. I have a pair of Grados with hard, open foam pads. They came with soft, closed foam. The closed foam covers the speaker and you get muffled sound. I am not an avid audiophile but I have mixed music for my church some years in the past.

There's nothing wrong with market segmentation, this is simply a poor implementation. Adding a piece of foam to cripple the sound makes the consumer feel ripped off.

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