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

There was another post about Rooms today:

There is no room that is acoustically correct without treatments. Rugs and drapes are not very good and could actually make your room to dead. You need a mix of absorption and diffusion. All corners will accumulate bass, this can be wall corners, soffit corners. Then there are 1st reflection points: in front of speakers on the floor, ceiling, side and the 1st reflection point for the opposite speaker.

The room is 1 of the most important pieces of an audio system

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.

My reference recordings are of acoustic instruments in reverberant space… mostly churches… The first distortion is… microphone selection… 

Not every reverberant space created equal… indeed listening seat… 

Room treatment for speakers is a science and black art…often overdone in those sterile audiophile rooms… don’t get me started by the tank trap forest of amplifiers blocking the TT on a massive rack planted between the speakers….

Don’t neglect diffusion… my favorite are from Arnold at Core Audio Designs… 

I think the title to this thread overstates the issue.  Obviously the room is very important, but it's only a make or break situation if the listener makes seriously unwise choices in loudspeakers.  It involves trade-offs.  If you want full range and loud you will need to utilize acoustical treatments.  If you only listen at moderate levels and you're willing to sacrifice some deep bass, then you'll need less treatments, if any.  Additionally, if you set up a true near field arrangement you can greatly reduce the need for acoustic treatments.  Plus, there are loudspeakers that are actually designed to control and/or reduce room interactions.  Gradient, Snell, Klipsch, Kii, Lyngdorf and others have some interesting designs.  It's more subtle than the thread title indicates.