I mostly echo twistyboxe's sentiment. Fact is that there have been many points in time that "professional audio reviewers" have falsely declared "everything is all the same" either when their ears or test instruments have been lulled into a stupor / a generation behind the products...
There are all kinds of subtle and dramatic differences in how various products are spec'd and built. Often times those differences are so grossly apparent you'd need only try to initially power up the devices to notice them while other kinds of differences only reveal themselves under more unique circumstances or years down the road.
I have no need or desire to "bash" any products in the broad marketpalce. I am only speaking from experience. There was a time when most manufacturers did "over build" their products and the relative success of firms that moved down a path of economization has made robustly specifying the narrowest tolerances/most reserved ratings a rarity. Some products do sound pretty much the same. I don't know that is necessarily a bad thing, as with the various highly promoted encoding schemes and such there is a certain industry "buy-in" that if it does not promote accuracy per se at least ensures "compliance with a specified minimum". There are still a HUGE percentage of "professionally installed" systems that have such gross problems in such basic things as phase / polarity that I suspect 90%+ of folks who got such "services" are listening to something that STILL makes to miss those low "minimums"...
The relationships that magazines / electronic publications have with home AV manufacturers is a complex one. The firms that make the products know they have to be well reviewed to have success in the marketplace. The reviewers know that their livelihoods are tied to the stream of revenue that flows from advertising AS WELL AS some trust from their readers that they will not sing songs of praise about products with unacceptable performance. One big side effect of this is that ALL manufacturers interact far more closely with ALL reviewers than either side will ever admit. If "review samples" start smoking the manufacturers' response is to send not another random unit off the line but one that has been verified as being on the vanishingly tiny leading edge of the QC curve, where every component has been pre-stressed and passed with flying colors. The honest reviewers will subtly note that experience, perhaps even offering their weird apology / boast of the esoteric equipment along the lines of "due to the uniquely demanding system that I have in my Reference SetUp the sample did encounter some anomalies but I am sure no home user would ever put the product through such a torture test". Yeah right. And the LearJet trip to the Vienna Opera was not a bribe either...
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