You're absolutely right. What you see in our society resembles Star Trek's Ferengi society: Amoral, cash-based social Darwinism with those at the top, who often add no value to the system given the highest rewards and gifted with the greatest political influence and ability to do harm in the pursuit of their narrowly-defined interests. The really fun part about all this is how it warps our society and its attitudes, allowing us to say (fill-in-the-blank) is poor and lazy when we have allowed wages to deteriorate to the point where entry-level wages are not commensurate with a decent lifestyle while we glorify the financial sector and allow it to drain intellectual resources from other fields and bail it out, putting it on society's dole when the quest for more, more quickly, causes it to turn the financial sector into a casino with obvious results. Not good.

I'm going to ignore the Sony hate and the price range. First: ignore sony-hate. Sony is a big company with lots of tentacles in a lot of pies and it is obvious that some parts of the company don't talk to one another. One thing Sony does well are consumer-level headphones which they make with an attention to reproducing consumer-level sound from buds and other things. The new XBA-1 series are not bad. With their balanced armature drivers, they provide a good, nuanced, balanced sound and they can go far enough in your ear behind silicone and foam earpieces to provide good sound coupled with good isolation. Sony offers other things in other price ranges. Much of it is good. Second: Up your price-range go up to the $80/$100+ range. Spend a little more and your'e in business at the low-end of the high end. This means award-winning Grado SR-60s, the Grado iGi high-end earbuds (they do Yo-Yo Ma's cello justice) for $130, you can get Sony MDR XB700s with fifty millimeter drivers in casques that look like princes Leia's buns that look stupid as all get out and sound *great*. Upping your price to here takes you out of sucker territory where headphone manufacturers sell all the things they drag out of their big box of "ghetto." Third: Avoid the low end of big name brands without serious consideration. Most super-big name headphone makers have a low-end product line that is wet, smelly garbage. Denon AHK 751s are sublime (so sublime they no longer make them) everything below them in the Denon line is landfill in the making. Sennheiser makes stunning, award-winning, mind-blowing, whole-notion-of-sound-redefining headphones: the price-range for them *starts* at several hundred dollars and the best part of the engineering that goes into everything else they made is the silk-screening that put their logo on them. Fourth: Read reviews and read them with a boulder of salt. If you need reviews, try Amazon. They crowd-source their reviews *and* have a program where their best writers get free items for reviewing. Amazon reviews can offer you a good spread of opinions--some of them honest: I've written several of them. Last: Be careful about Shure and Etymotic research. Shure is definitely not as good as they think they are for the prices they charge. Etymotic research is good even at the relatively low end (they require an hour or so of burn-in before they really do their thing) but they have filters which require changing and they're delicate with the low-enders breaking at the joint (glue doesn't work, sugrue does) or, better still, permanently dropping a channel about six seconds after they leave warranty.