"The room" is really just another part of the system. For a long time we thought the way to treat the room is like the way we were treating components. So we put huge tube traps and panels everywhere. Now we have a much more sophisticated view of vibration control. Lots of things now we want to suspend on springs so they can move independent of the room. Because we can hear this reduces ringing and greatly improves detail resolution. A good example, I put my crossover back inside the speaker but on Townshend Pods, with a huge instant improvement. A lot of the improvement comes directly from the control (precision damping) of resonant behavior. This same general principle is at work in their Podiums, speaker cables, and interconnects. That explains why after upgrading to a lot of this I noticed a huge reduction in bass bloat or tubbiness that I was until this point sure was a room problem.
Clearly then it was not. Imagine if I had gone to the trouble of "fixing" it the conventional way. I would now be looking at how to get rid of the great big tube traps sucking bass out of my room. Instead I use a mix of a small amount of cleverly placed panels combined with more next-generation treatments, Synergistic HFT. These are I guess room treatments, they definitely improve clarity, imaging, etc, but in a quite different way than conventional panels. Way more effective than old school panels. And I know, because I tried the panels!
So the room is no different than any other component, equally important, and like any other component a huge part of it is vibration control. With the room even more so. Also like all components it benefits from a more sophisticated view of vibration control.
