What's the point of reviewing?

The point is well taken -- this is an extraordinarily hard thing to compare for physical reasons above and beyond the interpretive and physiological differences btw people. But, of course, conditions never need to be "identical" to be not mooted.

When reviewers are articulate, they at least give a hint about what they like and what they’re hearing. That hint serves as a clue for people who find that their tastes might align.

Cf. Why read movie reviews or restaurant reviews? Same reason -- bc we find others there who seem like us AND they describe their listening conditions and tastes to help us see if it’s close enough to even take a hint.

This has nothing to do with statistics. It's about finding people who speak our language. Whose words are music to our ears.

@mahgister is right. There is strength in numbers. Many people drawing similar conclusions and representing a decent random sample is the secret sauce. Or even just several knowledgeable sources might do it.  
 

Every piece of equipment I have bought I have auditioned in my listening space. Plenty of dealers do this. The last piece I bought was a $26,000.00 DAC. Auditioned in my system for 3 weeks. 

We dont read reviews about an amplifier the same way we read reviews about meals and movies at all ...😁😊 Acoustic concepts are not food cooking or about "taste"...Nor movie genre...

With gear components we identifies what each listener say about, dynamic, timbre, transients, soundfield imaging and soundstaging, with what kind of gear his impressions are build , what are the musical albums used , what type of room...Etc and especially we pay attention to what he does not speak about.. We put them on a paper... After each reviews we add a column...

Statistics here means only that 35 reviews analysed is better than 5....The acoustic factors at play for the analysis had nothing to do with the 35 five different personnalities who created their own reviews...( except for common place fact as : we dont analyse review of people loving heavy metal to pick a balance headphone )

The point here is that if so many DIFFERENT people with DIFFERENT taste CONVERGE in impressions about each acoustic factors then you can believe it as a PROBABLE fact...

What the tastes of a single reviewer are MEANS nothing, because we analyse each acoustic factors written ideally by 35 different people, THATS THE POINT... ...

It is evident that even if someone has the same taste as me in music it does not means that the shape of his ears, the distance between his ears, the different components he was using, and in a very different room than mine all factors that differentiate him from me will help in a lesser way for a good pick up choice of gear than analysing the highest numbers of opinions possible about bass, timbre, highs, imaging, soundstage, transients ...This is so evident that i will not go further...

But if we are lazy we can read a reviewer or two we like and if they say this is very good, we can belive it....For sure... But it is not my general idea about reviews analysis...

And opposing the "similar taste" factor to my "statistics" is preposterous, because my point of view INCLUDE even taste of the reviewers but it is not the main factor at all , acoustic factors are the main one... we can even rank reviewers by our favorable opinion about their teste... ( I generally exclude heavy metal listener opinions or electronical music)...

I pick the Sansui amplifier and my AKG K340 as i described...Complete success...

the generalized question, in this day and age of information overload and the highly questionable veracity of much of said information, is how does one sort through what is available to draw salient, accurate, reliable conclusions upon which to act?

this question/issue applies in spades in this case of audio equipment reviews and online discussions... and lessons learned should apply profitably to all major decisions where info gathering is necessary