I doubt the reviewers are deaf, but they should be required to visit an audiologist and then publish their audiograms. Deluded? Reviewers that hear big differences in cables and magic amplifier bricks are most likely true believers. Crooked? Magazines are generally supported by ads. I don't know Stereophile's situation; maybe they are subscriber supported, but that would surprise me. Follow the money.
How did all this come about? In the early days of hi-fi the 'high end' was relatively expensive (McIntosh, Marantz) but you generally got good engineering for your dollar. And dealer support. Other more mass marketed stuff (factory built or kit--Dyna, Scott, HK, Fisher) was generally good quality at the price point. By the early '70s, Japanese manufacturing (sans import tariffs?) put affordable American companies out of business. Either that, or they outsourced production to Japan. The press? Some argued that Pioneer, Sansui, Kenwood, Japanese Marantz bought up all the ads, and got all the reviews. Even if it was true (ask Gordon Holt), most electronic reviews concentrated on specs, and in the spec department a Japanese receiver or integrated amp was, for the most part, good value. Also, the FTC rule on amp power advertising tended to standardize things (of course, to the detriment of tube amps, which were never designed for the 'preconditioning' phase of the power test).
The emergence of an American cottage 'high end' industry allowed American hi-fi to survive. But in a mutated and distorted form. Things moved quickly from engineering, to whatever someone could pay. It seemed a better business model to sell a hundred units for ten times the price of units that sold in the tens of thousands, to average folk. The question was, how in the heck could you sell something that cost ten times what something else did? Whatever could be the selling feature?
Mark Levinson was the Big Kahuna in all this. Before Mark, even an Audio Research tube preamp was kind of affordable; you could even buy a Dyna Stereo 70 'upgrade' kit from them. Mark changed all that. Of course he couldn't tell you why his preamp was better than a Pioneer. Only that it 'sounded' better. His trick was getting Harry Pearson, Peter Aczel (in his earliest iteration) and the Stereophile crowd on board. Aczel was the biggest ML supporter. It seemed that anything Mark sold, Aczel would buy, and then proclaim the 'best' there was. Until the next upgrade--then it was wash, rinse, and repeat. Pearson, for his part, was more a tube guy, etc. But what ever it was, it was all high priced. In order to justify it, specs were declared either meaningless, or elusive. No longer was it harmonic distortion. You now had to check transient intermodulation distortion, and other esoteric electrical goodies. Eventually even these were abandoned as having no bearing on 'sound'. A 'new' vocabulary was invented in order to figure it out. So now, instead of distortion, we have things like pace and rhythm.
However all that was and is, at least with a Levinson amplifier you more or less got/get what you paid for. A beast that could drive any known speaker, and that would probably last a long long time. Plus a dealer that would give you a loaner when it conks out. Back in the day, once you bought your mail order Pioneer from Warehouse Sound Company in San Luis Obispo, you were on your own. Probably the same with modern-day mail order, like Crutchfield, although they have a 60 day return policy. The scene is littered with defunct high end companies that were once the beez kneez, but now are forgotten. I can understand sort of buying an expensive amplifier, if you have hard to drive speakers. But I can't understand something like this Ayre Codex. Something like this would make Mark Levinson cringe. At least his stuff had class.