My room has catheral ceiling with a balcony. My system sound great to me.If having acoustically treated room would make my system sound like ,listening with headphones. That's interesting to me .I haven't used headphones in about 50 years.Using them would have killed my hearing.As we get older pur hearing disintegrates. I grew up in NYC with loud traffic,loud subways,seating up close to the stage and getting my ears blown out.Listing to my stereo loud.If i did use headphones for those 50 years now,I would certainly be deaf and not having the pleasure of listening to my music.If you use headphones while listening to music,Beware.
If you have a nice system why do you really need room treatments?
Yeah you may need an absorption panel if your room is completely open, ie. No rug or furniture, ie just lonely single chair. But if your system can't cut it in any room then it's a system problem and you should be able to discern a good system regardless of the room. Unless you put it on the roof of your apartment building but the Beatles seemed to have survived that effort
I think people go nuts with all this absorption acoustical room treatment stuff and it looks kind of awful. Once in a while you see a really cool looking diffuser panel and I would definitely want one. But to have a system that works really well without any of the acoustical panel distractions is a wonderful thing.