When I stumbled into high end audio in the late '70s I thought that what I saw in High Fidelity and Audio was the high end. But the true high end was very underground and had it's own snobbishness. They deliberately hid their shops in dental office buildings and such to avoid the common riff-raff. There was some cross pollination between TAS and Stereophile in the '90s. TAS was always a little further out due to Pearson's dominance. But he was really mostly about the music. Stereophile seemed to me to adopt the esoteric snobbishness to keep up. They they did an about face and went mass market. And folks started jumping between and even writing for both. And a few really went out on limbs with ebony hockey pucks and the like. I used to go to the Stereophile shows when they came to SF but that whole scene has gone expensive mass market and isn't about the music anymore. I heard so much harsh bombastic sound at the last one I went to I've never been back.
The Absolute Sound was more like a lunatic fringe, but served as comic relief with some of the advice (like tune your TV set between stations and other such nonsense.). Stereophile was relatively more grounded compared to TAS but still far from a scientific journal. The mainstream magazines were dismissed as being rubber stamps for the manufacturers but most mainstream product was already decent by then, and claims of large sonic differences were more a matter of exaggeration for effect.
My biggest criticism of the audiophool rags was they routinely featured reviews where a small handful of writers tested various review units by substituting them into their "reference" system, but contrary to the term there was nothing remotely reference quality about those systems or listening rooms. The more esoteric the gear, the more random or chance the review results, unless you happened to be drinking the same kool-aid and using the same esoteric reference components to balance out the sundry family colorations.
I literally had the exact same review unit, receive two wildly different reviews from two different reviewers (with their two different reference systems). I am confident that my unit behaved the same both times, so draw your own conclusions. I suspect the guy who didn't like the sound was using crap components for the rest of his system. (Coincidentally it was a well known reviewer from Strereophile who gave me the good review).
About then I decided to escape from that market since there was no linear cause and effect between product value and sales success. The thing i liked about large scale sound reinforcement is that it's hard to BS an auditorium full of listeners. The laws of physics tend to sort out the fakers.
JR
PS There were a handful of even smaller audio-phool magazines that were even more unreliable.