As for gifts to reviewers, it’s called an "accommodation" price, essentially the wholesale price--50 to 60 per cent of retail if it was new. So when a reviewer writes that he liked it so much he bought it, that’s an entirely different value assessment than his readers face. Moreover, accommodation units often go pretty quickly to the used market.
I had not heard, before Musician, of simply giving a new audio component to the reviewer. A bad review and he has a door stop for sale. A good review and there’s money to be made. Daniel1969 wrote in audiophilestyle.com, "I bought the sample Musician DAC from Sandu..." @debjit_g says he won’t go into the name of an American company that does that. I say, please do. Not surprised about cables. Their margins are tremendous so the give-away means very little. Plus there’s possible continuing publicity as the reviewer hooks up new components for review with those same cables.
While a well established print reviewer might have the liberty to give a bad review (or at least one that seems bad when you read between the lines) I don’t think that’s the case for internet reviewers. IMO manufacturers simply won’t take the chance of sending a product for review to someone who doesn’t churn out favorable reviews.
I agree that the quality of parts and layout can give a pretty good clue as to sound. Of course you have to know something about audio to evaluate the build of a component. A component cannot give more to the sound than it has good stuff within. I also made a decision on the Musetec, and other components, to a great extent on what was inside. I recall appreciating Goldensound’s review of the Holo May and the detail in which he revealed the details of its manufacture. It gave me the impresson he’s a serious guy. Most commercial reviewers, even the better ones, merely recite the component’s advertising copy to describe what’s inside.
I value the opinions of people who actually paid for their components, especially when there is a reasonably good number of them.