It doesn't hurt you that consumers are willingly enabling such corporate strategy by emptying their wallet en masse?
Consumers.... I love that. You mean the general society? I graduated in Sociology. It is not a Science. Because Science has great trouble describing almost any aspect of a society that you might name. For the most part, what society is, is and is not, is not something that can be described scientifically. So, almost anything said, or thought about society in general is at best an analogy, or a guess. So no, I don't "hurt" because "consumers" don't make "incorrect" decisions. We don't, know for sure, who "consumers" are. One thing we do know is, "did they buy it or not?" I do not have expectations of what society at large ought to be, regarding headphone quality, because that would be an
ignorant position, by definition.
This is not the case for a company that specifically puts together a headphone that they know is faulty in the sense of performance. V-Moda does not go around telling people honestly about the actual poor performance of their headphones (easily demonstrable by measuring) compared to other headphones. Why do they do this? Because they can. Business cares about law. There are no laws that specify that, "you'll be in big trouble if you're headphones do not measure as well as others," unless those performance measures are claimed in some type of legal agreement with people or another company. And that's what it takes with business people - they must be
forced to do the right thing (see Ford Pinto). Try that with a new car, which legally cannot be sold in the United States except in special circumstances without broadly available crash test data. Also, a car's mileage must be made clear to the public by law. No one dies or loses large sums of money if they buy a poorly performing set of headphones, so the government doesn't put a lot of money into "getting those lying headphone manufacturers." If that was the case, everyone in charge of Bose would be in jail.
But these makers of expensive headphones know exactly what they are doing, down to the penny, if they are managing their company properly. You know it, and I know it. Who's to blame for a company putting out a product which they know is substandard compared to another? I have fairly expensive Shure headphones and they measure fairly well, because Shure
made that happen. It's knowable, and you can find out if necessary who made which decisions regarding the production of the headphones. You cannot find this information - who's to blame, in the general public, without extensive polling and even then, there are problems with collecting this kind of data.
If you believe that there is some aspect of "society" that you don't like, fine. That's up to you, but don't call any of that kind of knowledge beyond simple polling, scientific. With companies that make headphones that measure poorly,
specific decisions are made as to the performance of said headphones. Sometimes companies will publish performance data on very high-end headphones, but most do not. The ones who do not, might tell you, "this sounds great," and they do that because they can
get away with it, and no one dies, because of the decision to offer poorly performing headphone products. So no, I do not have a concept in my head of "how much a given member of society ought to be educated about the performance of headphones in general," and therefore that "hurts."
No. Bad headphone companies generally aren't killing people, but they
often are liars who take people's money for poor products without remorse. And in this case, quite a bit of money. These people can be specifically identified. These are some reasons why, to some degree, the government regulates the legal behavior of businesses. Because some businesses people will do almost anything for money. Therefore, regulations have often necessarily been foisted on businesses by the government, because that legal hand was - forced by the behavior of conniving leaders of companies, and sometimes the behavior of their workers.
There is no known group scheming to buy themselves substandard headphones because they are ignorant about it. There is no, "white makes right," groups supporting bad headphones. No one is out there lynching people because they use the wrong set of headphones. And no one is coming after headphone manufactures who are blatant liars, because it does not address something that is otherwise dangerous for society.
You can blame society (consumers) for whatever you wish if it helps you sleep at night. Just don't call your conclusions scientific.