[Arny Krueger]

The following paper provides scientific evidence for the idea that spending
lots of money makes people have more favorable perceptions about the objects
that they lavish their cash on:

http://www.pnas.org/content/105/3/1050.abstract

"Despite the importance and pervasiveness of marketing, almost nothing is
known about the neural mechanisms through which it affects decisions made by
individuals. We propose that marketing actions, such as changes in the price
of a product, can affect neural representations of experienced pleasantness.
We tested this hypothesis by scanning human subjects using functional MRI
while they tasted wines that, contrary to reality, they believed to be
different and sold at different prices. Our results show that increasing the
price of a wine increases subjective reports of flavor pleasantness as well
as blood-oxygen-level-dependent activity in medial orbitofrontal cortex, an
area that is widely thought to encode for experienced pleasantness during
experiential tasks. The paper provides evidence for the ability of marketing
actions to modulate neural correlates of experienced pleasantness and for
the mechanisms through which the effect operates."

More specifically, the authors took 20 volunteers, fed them wine, and did
not let them know if they were tasting a $10 wine or a $90 wine. When they
were told they were drinking the $90 wine, the fMRI recorded higher levels
of activity in the part of the brain associated with pleasure. This happened
regardless of which wine they drank.

The application of this paper to audiophilia is pretty obvious. A mechanism
has been identified in the human brain that causes people to perceive more
pleasure from products whose only difference from other products is that
they simply cost a great deal more.