"The room can totally wreck, or make, a system"

@baylinor Thanks for affirming. Danny's video is not the best of these sorts of things, but it's recent. He has some good ideas about how to do it on the cheap just to start out and see what difference it makes.

I'm posting it because this lesson (of the room's importance) was so helpful in keeping me from going down rabbit holes about this or that amp, speaker, etc. I suppose part of the hobby's fun is just being oblivious to the room's contribution and then chasing gear, arguing about how it sounds, and never quite getting one's bearings. Then again, there are many people posting who are dying to "get off the constant cycle of buying and selling gear, chasing Nirvana." It's pretty clear you can't find your way out of the forest without a compass. Learning my room became my compass.

Best $500 dollars that I ever spent was DIYing a case of 703 Owen’s-Corning rigid fiberglass panels. 

Hear hear. I did that right away for my 6.5 foot ceiling. Made the room usable.

I would add this. “A person’s hearing ability can totally wreck or make their audio system “. My gut feeling tells me that many audiophiles having hearing deficiencies but don’t correct them. 

My gut feeling is that an audiophile that doesn't correct their room, barring a spouse that defies them, has a brain deficiency not a hearing deficiency. Or, they are audiophiles that don't seek the best sound — an oxymoron. Even folks with hearing problems can hear a huge percentage of what is there. Hans B. has covered this.

I upgraded my AVR and it came with Addyssey room equalization software. It was a hallelujah moment.

I've encountered too many purists who won't go for room correction. I use it for my subs and it solved the issue. I'd rather have good sound with room correction than do nothing! (And there's some good room correction gear out there, such as Lyngdorf.)

So many people are let down after laying out big bucks for what they thought was the speaker of their dreams once the honeymoon period of new ownership fades and the true critical listening begins…

It certainly is good for reviewers who can say "Best speaker ever" to people who really just have a room problem but want to buy their way out of their problem.

You can do more harm than good however, if you don’t know what you are doing, or just put some things in the room, thinking it will make an improvement.

More harm than good...depends. Some rooms are really bad to begin with, and almost anything (properly placed) will help. But generally I agree.

And learning REW -- https://www.roomeqwizard.com/ --and buying one $100 Umik gets you on the way.

Read about REW. Watch a couple videos. Learn what you’re trying to address first. Then buy conservatively what you probably need (look locally first) and then add incrementally, measuring all the while. This is how you establish a correlation between what you hear and what the measurements show. Repeat as needed.

My background is in recording studios and I couldn’t imagine trying to put a system together without first doing basic room treatment. Between standing waves and reverb time, I would find it impossible to evaluate gear.

Agreed.

I disagree about hearing the room. +1 @cleeds

A listening room is not a mixing studio. The reason is that "what it’s like" to hear music is to hear it in a room. When speakers play, the whole room is engaged, physically. The fact that this sounds different than headphones or a deadened room is worth it because as live creatures hearing things in a space is part of what it’s like to hear anything. This is why it’s nice to hear singers in a church.

"Research proved that in a live musical environment, approximately 30% of what we hear is direct sound while 70% is reflected from walls, ceilings and floors and only reaches our ears a few milliseconds after the direct sound. The human brain uses direct sound for identification and to calculate location, but uses reflected sound to determine musicality and spaciousness, as well as direction."

Right — and this is why a deadened room sounds "weird." 

I appreciate the pushback on the way I phrased the OP. I think it is possible to have good rooms if mid or nearfield listening is possible. That said, the space I was setting up in was going to be near to midfield and it needed help. 

At first, I way over treated it. I got a lot of panels for free from someone local -- bass traps, absorbers of different kinds, a couple diffusers. Put too much in and took a lot out — but not the bass traps nor the absorbers on my 6.5ft ceiling. Things were not right so I got a bunch of diffusers and they did the trick.

@mashif

Sure, live music occurs in an acoustic space and that’s an important part of the original sound. But a good recording captures that sound and that’s what I want to hear. An untreated, live room distorts the sound in the recording by adding sound that wasn’t part of the original performance. No different than noise.

A room needs both diffusion and absorption for different reasons. But the net effect of good treatment is reducing the sound of the room and allowing you to hear the recording without added noise, which is what reflections are. Noise that wasn’t contained in the original recording.

You’ve made a great case for a pair of headphones or near-field listening.

Your argument doesn't seem to extend to studio recordings, does it?  If I'm listening to Aja by Steely Dan, which is mixed to the nth degree, what kind of "room acoustics" are in there? Or EDM? It is up to my gear and my room to provide a canvas for that sound. The canvas can be good (well treated room) or bad.

For some reason, when I’ve treated my room and gotten the frequency curve and reflections where I want them, the music sound full, well placed in the sound stage, and relaxed. When I sit near-field or put on headphones, I feel suffocated.

No, there’s a difference between a good sounding, properly treated room that is not just about "adding noise." It is adding naturalness, the physiologically-based experience which was described before. If this was not true, most people on this forum would just be wearing headphones or would have formed a hobby around collectively bad taste.

@mashif Understood and agree.

This is why it is so difficult to get new entrants into this hobby; we keep making it more complicated (and expensive) for newbies to put together a system (including room) that is acceptable to 'us" and not subject to outright ridicule and scorn.

I have no idea what this means. We are having a discussion. If some of it goes above a new entrants' head, well that's not our responsibility. This is not a textbook or a "how to" blog. If some new person needs an explanation, they can ask for it. They're not children.

The environment is always the first thing to fix, better yet design, correctly and then use room treatments.

Then it comes to placement of all the gear and furnishings, speaker placement most critical.

Why is this the order? I would have supposed that speaker placement comes first because otherwise, how would one know where the first reflection point (and others) are? 

I thought the way to do it was to put speakers first. Happy to be corrected.

Personally, I don’t spend on upgrades unless there is an acoustic reason. Otherwise, the money is wasted. I agree that all rooms need acoustic control because the room and system are inextricably linked.

As for brand names, I am going to disagree a little bit. While some market products by taking advantage of the narcissistic consumer, I think some designers understand acoustics. After all, acoustics is part of a division of engineering, and engineers build audio equipment. Not every brand markets only on the assumption that their customers don’t understand acoustics -- or don’t want to. This forum is filled with consumers who care about acoustics. And, we could list many audio brands whose designers understand acoustics.

That does not mean that these engineers always try to solve the room for the listener -- but there is more than one speaker manufacturer out there that tries to offer placement advice to their customers, right?

And then there are the engineers who design acoustic treatments and offer guidance (such as GIK). Those are "brands" that use their knowledge of acoustics to help customers.

"In my experience, an optimally controlled, low-cost system in a room designed for it will generally outperform a more expensive, out-of-the-box system in a typical living room."

Agreed. But I also think you are on very correct ground to claim that a $1000 system in a great room can beat a $100,000 system in a bad room. That is how much we agree that the room is important.