I can prove your room is bad


So you want to upgrade?  You want to know what the next big thing is you can do for a better sounding experience?

Try this.  Pull up a chair 2' in front of your speakers.  If you can't move the speakers, put it up to just 1, and listen for yourself.

The difference between what you hear sitting in front of the speaker like this, and what you hear at your normal location is all in the speaker dispersion and room acoustics. If you feel mesmerized, entranced, and wowed by your speaker at 2' but not 8' you really should consider improving the room, and if you can't, consider getting speakers with alternative room coupling, like ESL's, line arrays, bi-polars, etc.

That is all,


Erik
erik_squires
Mine sound just fine from where I sit....zero room treatment, just your average furnished room with both soft and reflective surfaces...I like my room and will not add UFO's to it....😁
Erik is right. You can dramatically reduce room effects by getting a line source bipolar ESL. Then you only need some acoustic tile behind the speaker nothing else. What you will notice is that the speaker sounds exactly the same at 12 feet as it does at 6 inches. Very spooky. The only manufacturer of this type of speaker now is Sound Labs. 
Excuse me. Bipolar is the wrong term. It should be dipole. Bipoles radiate from both sides in phase. Dipole the sides are 180 degrees out of phase.
ARC/DSP EQ are good tools. 

They are not better alone, nor are they as good as room treatment.  They are very complementary. For instance, it's much easier to treat room modes and nulls with than without room treatment.
Given no alternatives, you should use EQ.  Given the choice of 1, room treatment.  Given the ability to do both, do it!