The room/speaker interface is a cause of much audiophile dissatisfaction. Unfortunately, it isn't easy to cure the problem, as there are only so many things most of us can do or are prepared to do. I solved this exact dissatisfaction purely by accident. Some ten years ago, a classified ad appeared in my local newspaper for a pair of Infinity IRS Gammas at a ridiculously appealing price. I bought them because my then-current speakers irritated and fatigued me, and no amount of monkeying with positioning and electronics achieved much improvement. When I intially set up the Gammas, they were no better. But the Gammas have a user interface absent on almost all other speakers: Each of the five drivers has a level adjustment. After several hours of experimentation, I found what for me were the ideal settings for each driver's level (left and right speakers aren't identically set, by the way) and made diagrams to commemorate my preferred settings in case somebody played with them. The result for me was audio nirvana. Much of the source material I couldn't previously abide sounds compelling. The best material moves me to tears.
Interestingly, I've since had the system checked with a spectrum analyzer, and the frequency response is close to flat. In fact, I was unable to adjust the driver level settings to get a flatter response, only to shift the frequencies where the small deviations occur, with less-pleasing (to my ear) sonic results.
The settings I prefer are far from the centerline for most of the drivers, some well to the negative side and some well to the positive, others just off center. Small changes produce big (usually unpleasant) results.
Assuming that the centerline represents flat output in an anechoic chamber as measured by Infinity for manufacturing purposes, the adjustments I've made compensate for the impact of my room and its furnishings on the speakers' frequency response. My experience suggests that the room in which accurate speakers are placed can at best be neutral but more likely denegrate performance. Infinity's solution was to create an intuitive way of letting the listener compensate. If drivers cannot be adjusted, as is most commonly the case for most speakers, then the room has to be modified, a far more complicated procedure, or equalization needs to be applied, a procedure that has its own weaknesses from my experience, in that a noticeable veiling of detail results.
