"Often the goal of the review is to justify its ridiculously high price".
JC, the statement you made here just sums everything up beautifully. When you see a reviewer like this under discussion review a really expensive boutique esoteric piece of equipment, I can't recall EVER, a reviewer saying anything but that it was "state of the art and well worth the money"!
Even after the Lexicon fiasco of two or three years ago when they were caught taking an intact $400 Oppo chassis and putting it in to a $3600 Lexicon Blu-Ray player, they continued to come up with all sorts of excuses why it was worth all that extra money and that included some of the reviewers that, no doubt, took advertising money from them. The same thing happened recently when "SIM Audio" did that with a Denon chassis. Of course, theirs was many times the price of the Denon. It is the culture, these so-called "high-end" reviewers still cannot come to grips with the fact that audio excellence does not have to come at enormous expense.
