I couldn't have said it better:

“The High Fidelity makers discovered this the hard way. Far too many folk stopped buying the minute they had something that they felt was good enough for their needs. Only a smallish group of die-hard audiophiles kept buying, and they bought only the top end. For them to buy, the new thing had to be demonstrably better than their current thing. Things got so ridiculous that some started hearing things that weren’t probably there. (Note that I’m not dismissing “golden ears”, but that many who thought they had such ears were just imagining things, not actually discriminating them.)”

Of course, Thom's most recent essay is about camera manufacturers not understanding the market. Still, the premise stands: "some started hearing things that weren't probably there".