Arny Krueger wrote:

Stereophile's basic editorial policy is clearly that everything sounds
different, with heavy emphasis on the word everything. In fact, some things
sound different, and some things don't.


As soon as a manufacturer is an
"interesting-potential-advertisement-customer" his products start to
sound different... ;-)

IMO as soon as you have eliminated the poor constructed electronics you
can focus at 99.999% on speakers, their placement and the listening room
acoustic.
The expensive accessories are only 0.001 % of the final result... But
good customers for magazines advertisers.