How important is a flat response?

It is possible to love a system that is not musically accurate. Just because a person likes the sound of their system doesn't mean it's accurate, and just because a system is accurate doesn't mean you will like the sound of it!

Some people like exaggerated bass, or midrange; that's their personal preference. It all depends what a person is trying to accomplish when establishing their system. Since this is a subjective hobby, anything goes, but there are many to whom tonal accuracy is everything. To reproduce a tone accurately a system has to have an accurate frequency response.

Sdcampbell is correct with his assertion that the room will adversely (usually) affect the sound of a system. A good system in a compromised room will not be capable of good sound. Fortunately it costs less to treat a room than it does to buy new gear. You will not have to sink tons of money into fixing some of the anomolies you are experiencing.

I've had the pleasure to listen in a Rives designed dedicated room. Wow! I'm not quite sure how to explain the benefits beyond the pure, flat frequency response except, other things are allowed to happen that otherwise wouldn't. Things are....life sized. I hope that makes some sense. Headphones don't measure up to or equal the overall effect either, IMO. Those that say the room is the most important system component have a point that I can't argue with. After saying that however, I spent the last four hours in my non-professionally designed room and enjoyed it immensely.

What are we trying to do here?
We are trying to experience the spark in the composer's mind expressed by the music made by an orchestra (or Jimi's Strat). Having a flat system response tells us one thing; How well the recording engineer was able to put the performance onto recordable media.
This should be ALL a system is required to do (and look pretty too).

Most people won't have a clue how flat or at what frequencies they have peaks & nulls, even with some kind of oscilloscope or Rives-like device.

Just mode the mike up, down and sideways by 6 inches and you will see significant changes in the response. It's an inexact science at best.

But .. from what I understand from experts they advise leaving the nulls alone and simply try to trim the peaks. First off, it's far easier to do this. And secondly, something about artificially boosting nulls that gets real tricky and causes all sorts of other problems. This is probably why room treatments tend to be sound absorbing (in general terms, of course). The best way to fill nulls at your listening position might be to find out where they are strongest in the room and try some kind of deflection technique to spread them a bit more eavenly.

Enjoy the process - it's definitely daunting.
Bob

I second what Ptmconsluting wrote.

Ethan Winer is a noted acoustician and here's a link to a discussion forum he moderates. Notice the graph of the bass response in his personal room. It's definitely not flat. Room modes make it virtually impossible to attain flat response.