Except the Shinkansen is a train?

For headphones, DEFINITELY not true in my experience. There’s cheap and gimmicky (like Skullcandy), there’s perceived “luxury” brands like Beats (which aren’t actually worth their money) but then there’s brands that actually offer significantly better quality and longevity for the price, like Sennheiser, Beyerdynamic, Audio-Technica and Sony to name a few.

Seems like everything is back to normal, at least from what I can tell on my end and a lot of other users’ reports.