Headphone prices are not spread evenly. They gather at a small number of figures, with wide empty gaps between them, and the products at each point tend to be built to a similar recipe.
Price points come before the product
Retail buyers plan a range by price rather than by specification, filling each point in the ladder so a shopper has a clear choice at every budget.
Manufacturers develop products to fit those slots, because a product that lands between two points competes against both and wins neither.
The empty gaps are therefore not a market failure but the result of everyone designing towards the same set of numbers.
Each threshold unlocks specific components
The parts that define headphone cost are the drivers, the wireless chipset, the battery, the microphones and the noise-cancelling implementation.
Crossing a price threshold makes a better version of one or two of these affordable, which is why products at a given point share capabilities so closely.
Below the point where multiple microphones and dedicated processing become viable, active noise cancellation is present in name more than in effect.
Tuning is cheap and does much of the work
How headphones sound depends heavily on the frequency response chosen by the manufacturer, which is a design decision rather than a component cost.
Two products with similar drivers can sound very different, and the more expensive one is not automatically the more accurate.
This is why price predicts features such as cancellation, battery life and build quality far better than it predicts sound.
Brand licensing sits on top of the ladder
Many headphones are built by contract manufacturers and sold under names licensed from audio or fashion brands.
The licence is a cost that comes out of the same budget as the components, so a licensed product at a given price often contains less hardware than an unbranded equivalent.
The same platform appearing under several names at different prices is common, and it explains otherwise puzzling similarities between competing models.
Where discounts change the ladder
Because the points are fixed, a discount that moves a product down a rung puts it against competitors built to a lower cost.
That is the situation in which a sale genuinely delivers more product for the money, rather than simply moving a price within its own band.
Watching for the moment a model crosses a threshold is more useful than watching the size of the discount, since the threshold is where the component difference sits.