Your advice to speakers designers

You can pretty a good sounding room up a bit but room treatments are inherently homely.  It's all subjective anyway but anything dealing with sound absorption/diffusion is going to have to have quite a bit of surface area to be effective and will have to be placed where it works effectively.  Neither of these things are conducive to good looks.  If looks, decor are a priority the sound will suffer.  I don't believe there's any way around it.  

jon,

My living room (in which we put our nice furniture and decor) was good sounding even before I remodeled it with an acoustician. It had an asymmetrical layout with bay windows, a wide opening to a hallway, and a good ratio of furniture and live to dead acoustics. Whether it was speaker designers, or sound mixers, or fellow audiophiles, all of them were amazed by the sound I got in my room.

After the remodel, it’s even easier to get great sound. And the room treatments are all hidden, built in to the structure of the room in a way that no one ever suspects to be room treatment. It’s completely "clean" looking of room treatment in that sense (I hate the look of room treatments).

And I bet my room is sonically better than plenty of people spending far more on speakers, placed in rooms which are aesthetically challenged looking.

It’s just not true to say if aesthetics are important "the sound will never be great." That’s what industrial design, a care for style,  and ingenuity are all about.

prof, be nice, will you? Especially when visiting my threads. 
To answer your question. Imaging is not everything. The better the sound is the less need you have to sit in front of the speakers. But I am not far from them. I do critical listening too from time to time.

Just a general bit of added gab:

They don’t call them ’inferior desecrators’ for nothing.

Very close to 100% of inferior desecrators and even architects do not take acoustics into account in their designs and finished product. If they do, they do with with a minimal concern or they do it with rubber stamp textbook knowledge applied, which is just as disastrous, maybe more -depends.

I’ve witnessed this form of a disaster many many dozens of times, when I go into a job as an attached extra mind and eyes, when Taras is brought in to deal with their disasters.

Usually it’s a fight to the death to hold onto the appearance of the space to be as original and unperturbed as possible, and to spend zero dollars on an acoustical fix. That zero cost acoustical fixes have to be completely invisible. Two impossible requirements that even on their own are impossible.

The next step is they don’t know what they are dealing with so they think that textbook acoustic formulas can apply to the issue and try to tell the acoustician what they are doing and what it will cost.

The connected problem is that they’ve ~spent all their money~and don’t have any left over to fix the acoustical nightmare. They project this frustration and mess upon the acoustician they’ve brought in. The arguments are fighting about 4 types of ignorant ’city hall’ (declarative people who won’t back down in any way), all at the same time.

Everyone involved is angry about the problem, angry that they don’t understand it, angry about the potential costs and angry that their work is going to be disturbed. The solution person is attacked from multiple directions before they even walk through the door.

Out there, in the architectural and home design world in North America (on the mega to minor install level), this scenario plays out probably a few dozen times per day.

Like Plumbers and dentists, acoustician is one of the most thankless specialized jobs that exist. And notably more obscure.

Regardless, due to the specialty being in-house, so to speak, every time we're involved directly in the set up and implementation the given room at a show, we tend to get best of show either in print, by award, or by word of mouth. I think we missed that..maybe once? if ever?

Right. Solution people are always attacked from multiple directions, that's why we live in such a mess.