I grew up in the UK with the Gramophone magazine. Its primary purpose is reviewing classical music, first on records, then on digital media. It has been going for over 100 years.
It devoted a couple of pages per issue to reviewing playback equipment. There was rarely a bad review, but this was dictated by space, not by money. The audio editors simply did not waste their valuable space on second rate equipment.
Good performances were usually compared with other good performances. When the same recording kept coming up as a comparison piece, you could expect it to be among the best. Same with audio. And when they disclosed what they provided their top reviewers with, in order to judge top recordings, you knew it was good.
This was helped by detailed technical discussion of the reasons why a piece of gear achieved its results.
Of course, the results do not translate well across the North Atlantic, primarily because relative prices are influenced by import duties and tariffs but also because room sizes tend to be very different.