@audiotroy , thanks for your detailed reply.
"we take a systematic approach which has been honed by having tons of gear incomming and outgoing."
That makes sense. All parts of the chain matter. But I think the place where problems are most likely to arise is the speaker/room interaction, so imo that’s a good place to focus attention. I see speaker + room as a "system within a system". (Actually imo it’s amp + speaker + room = "a system within a system", but this thread isn’t about amps).
To put it another way, some speaker designers build the best speaker they can and then it is up to the user to fix any room interaction issues. That is not my approach. I try to take the room into account from the beginning.
For instance, you mentioned using a bunch of pillows to fix "the hardness that the room was feeding back". I highly doubt the room took smooth reverberant energy and altered its frequency response such that it became "hardness". Imo it is far more likely said "hardness" was already characteristic of the off-axis energy, and the room was reverberant enough for it to became objectionable.
What if the speaker’s off-axis response had been smooth? In that case we’d be in pretty good shape whether the room reflected back a little or a lot of reverberant energy. We wouldn’t need room treatments to fix a problem that originated with the speakers. If we don’t need room treatments to fix the speakers, we can use them to improve imaging and spaciousness and timbre, which would call for a different approach (emphasizing reflection management and/or diffusion rather than absorption).
I am well aware that different rooms sound different, so I build an unusual amount of user-adjustability into my designs, rather than expecting the end user to fix the in-room sound with room treatments and/or equipment changes.
You mentioned using the pile of pillows trick at multiple audio shows. I haven’t needed anything like that to fix the room. A veteran manufacturer who first showed with us a year ago said that ours was the first room he had ever shown in where "we weren’t fighting with the room for the whole show."
So I do respect your systematic approach of taking everything into account. I haven’t described everything I do here but I think mine is a systematic approach as well, just with emphasis on a particularly problematic system-within-the-system.
Duke