If you want lame advice DON'T do this!

People always talk about how bad the rooms are at audio shows and some years ago I entered one to check out some gear. The door was one of those slow closing types and music was playing so I turned to pull the door quicker than unassisted to close off the noise in the hall. 

As I was closing it with my back to the room I thought to myself, Man....that's some great sounding cello playing and when I turned around, it was Vincent Belanger playing cello in the room. A room a little bigger than my living room.

Next up were the speakers (I forget the brand) playing the same piece and damn if it didn't sound practically the same. Quite the feat and there were no room treatments in it.

Other rooms in the hall of the same size and shape just didn't seem to cut the mustard and that's when I filed in my head that the room, to a point, can have negative effects but it's the gear and the way it's set up. The rest are excuses.

All the best,
Nonoise

WTF...I thought this hobby/indulgence was supposed to be fun and relaxing...y'all need to get some sun, have a margarita or whatever floats your boat and listen to some Marley.

@macg19 Clearly you're new here.

@secretguy Relatively speaking, yes I'm new here. But like everyone else I can throw in my $2 (adjusted for inflation).

I'm all in for a good debate but surely we can do this in a civil fashion without name calling. (Not suggesting you are) 

OP, you say, "Every professional installer (either for the home or the studio) measures, tweaks, measures, listens, and gets it right."

My experience is otherwise. I've owned systems from 2 figures to 6, and every one of them was better than what the pros did in a public building near me. 10 days ago I was treated to one that was even worse.

Of course there are experts who know what they are doing. The famous Cox, who did the research on room dimensions is a superb example. He found that most rooms are just plain bad, and that the difference between good and just OK can be as little as 2 cm in one dimension. Ignore the science at your peril - like some pros it seems.

You know there are many variables that make a system sound good so why not just be gracious and ask the poster questions.  All of this is subjective even if technically it says otherwise.  

I would never put my TV and surround system in a dedicated listening room, regardless of what somone else does.  You are compremising one or the other.

@oldrooney 

but it is not easy to master if you’re not familiar with acoustic measurement taking.

You already learned to move your MLP and what did that cost? Time, maybe a learning curve. Imagine if you didn't have that information and attempted to "fix" it by buying new equipment. It would be money down the tubes. I went through the same thing, instead of flushing dollars I went to doing what you are going through. Moved my MLP forward so its equidistant from the back wall, placed my speakers a t precise angles using a tape measure and a laser pointer, measured again and it was better, critically listened and WOW. Not bad for an afternoons work and I didn't need to buy new gear.

@macg19 

WTF...I thought this hobby/indulgence was supposed to be fun and relaxing

There is casual listening and critical listening, they both can be fun.

@terry9

"Every professional installer

Every competent professional installer

You are of course correct about bad installers, and I see the bad ones on youtube, ouch!

This video is about proper calibration:

https://youtu.be/CN0HGuE7s7Q

My streamer is a Paradigm Link which was only $199 on sale and has all the streaming features I need AND an RCA in port so I can also connect a TT or a CDP to it if I wanted. The reason it is so good is because it has ARC room correction. I use the toslink out to my Sony TAZH1ES dac/pre. The end result is a true holographic soundstage, crystal clear intonation of voices, every pluck of a cello, every breath of a singer, every shimmer of a cymbal or a triangle. It sounds so amazing NOT because of the streamer or the dac/pre. It sounds amazing because it is tuned to my room just right. No matter how much you spend on your front end, if the notes smear, if the noise doesn’t allow them to stand in their own space of the soundstage, you are missing the point. To do this strictly by ear is painstaking because you don’t know what you don’t know. Maybe it sounds great but you don’t know how much better it can get. When you see a measurement like the one below it basically confirms you have squeezed the living daylights out of your room to focus in a great performance for every track you play. I had a professional acoustician review this graph, he said even my FR before the ARC correction was outstanding due to the attention I gave to my room. The corrected graph is even better as you can see.

Imagine someone wants to buy new gear and they posted this graph, how much better advice could you provide if you saw this first: