Most of the magazine reviewers have terrible rooms, some way too small, others with wood floors and they claim there is no bass, speakers aren’t setup correctly, and most don’t have any treatments. The more credible reviewers on YouTube and the internet pay more attention to room size, setup, and treatments.
This past year, TAS reviewed a few products that were 6-digits claiming they were the best of the best (what’s new, every product they review is the best). But in this case, multiple rooms at last years axpona sounded terrible with these products in these rooms. Multiple sites on YouTube and the web stated that these rooms sounded terrible, so when TAS came out with their reviews of axpona, they created a new column of terrible sounding rooms which was new. They had to do this because the other reviewers did this before them.
HiFi+ years ago showed each of their reviewers rooms with a description of what reviewer had along with room dime sound. The other mags attempted to do this but failed