Quote Originally Posted by paul_pci
My basic answer: snobs, and proud of it.

My extended answer (with underlying snobbery): Your question is not so much about objective quality across brands and price ranges, but about marketing and how markets are divided up and how brands and price ranges demarcate separate but still overlapping markets. For instance, Consumer reports targets a mass market, so yeah, Panasonic will emerge a victor, but not necessarily king. Sound and Vision has less of a mass market appeal, yet I would argue some overlapp with Consumer Reports. But when you open up Stereophile, obviously we are not in Kansas anymore. So, what you are hearing is the rhetoric of market-coding which acts similar to class coding. (Cars would be a good analogy here). I wrote in a previous thread about Best Buy vs. Magnolia Audio that it seemed given Magnolia's stock, they were trying to appeal to a different market than BB, but given my experience of crappy and uninformed customer service and their suspect inclusion of Bose, that their attempt to appeal to a different market ultimately fails. I set up a friend of mine with a basic surround package, including a lower end of the line Yamaha receiver that I started out with and he's happy with it. I told him I just bought some new speakers and he said I was crazy and there would be no difference in sound. Of course, there's a difference in sound, but the point is that our exchange arises because we're in two different makets for audio equipment. In our highly commericialized and consumer culture, all us of are susceptible to desire a self-image that comes with buying certain brands in certain price ranges. I would argue that it is impossible to set aside concerns of image and which market you wish to belong to in the process of analyzing receiver quality differences. One can only be aware of this factor and limit its power in the decision making process.
Ugghh...freshman marketing revisted

Great post, paul_pci, though I would respectfully submit that you can further subdivide the population into 2 groups...those that do care about which "class" they belong too, and those that really don't (and probably a third: those that aren't even aware there are separate classes or markets for this stuff).

Then there's those that spend more time reading about, talking about, arguing about, shopping for, and preaching about than actually using the equipment they have....