Have you treated your listening space?

Note that many respected gear reviewers don't "treat" their rooms with anything beyond furniture, rugs, and bookcases, although they go to great lengths to tweek things like speaker placement and isolation of components...maybe this is because they want the "real world" environment of the sound of the room. If you want to turn a living space into an anachoic chamber I suppose that's fine as nobody will hear you when you shoot yourself in the foot. I really do think the answer to the "treatment obsessed" is to use good headphones while sitting on a subwoofer.

Uh, of course no one is suggesting turning the room in an anecolic chamber. But there are standing waves and early reflections as well as echos and other effects that really do interfere with the sound. It's a question of how far one wishes to go in the pursuit of the best sound. If one wishes to ignore the problem, well, that's a different matter.

Wolf.
Anecolic chamber?
You must not have any experiance with room treatments and the wonderful sonic improvements that they can produce.
If you've ever heard the effects of a correctly treated room, you wouldn't say such things.

The quality of the room and treatments are roughly one-third of the sound quality. I never cease to be amazed at the high $$$ systems posted here with inappropriate listening environments. Seems such a waste to me.

I recently had an opportunity to set up a new room and was able to listen to it without treatment and with. I added 4 inch bass corner traps and then added some two inch panels on the wall behind the speakers. My room sounded pretty good without the treatments, since I took my time with the proper speaker placement. With treatments, the soundstage is better defined, and more open (larger). Also, I eliminated the bass spikes at certain frequencies near the walls and corners. This was not an expensive project. I got my panels from Acoustimac and they were really well made and shipped quickly. The "ready bags" from Ready Acoustics were a non starter. I ordered the bags in November of 2010 and finally just got a refund in August. Needless to say I will never use them again.