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
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!
My original point was to help audiophiles figure out if the direct speaker signal was making it well enough to their seat, without tools. Your question is, literally and figuratively, orthogonal to my own. ;-)
Actually its spot on. Speakers radiate in three ways- on axis, off axis (whose response should be smooth) and total room energy. The latter is probably the least understood, and is where many speakers fall flat on their front baffles.

For more on this, here is Dr. Floyd Toole, using Science to show how this works:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrpUDuUtxPM
The relevant information relating to this topic starts at 23 minutes. Pay attention to the comments about Sound Power. If in a hurry, skip to 31 minutes and you can see that the total energy in the room is the dominant factor but is actually to a large degree a function of the speaker rather than the room!