Eq is the great equalizer. It’s true. Most all room acoustics + imperfect gear performance means things will almost always come up short to some degree until some form of correction is applied. Not only that, but chances are you won’t even know it until things are finally corrected properly and compared.
All speakers have a little EQ built in
It may come as a shock to audio purists but part of the work of a crossover is level matching as well as tonal adjustments of individual drivers. Ahem. That's what we call equalization.
This is true whether the speaker uses active or passive crossover, and may be in place just to adjust phase matching in the crossover range.
Also, curiously, while companies may brag about the number of parts in their crossovers, more parts does not indicate more quality. It may just indicate more equalization had to be done to the drivers to get them to match.