I'm never going to hear a megaspeaker in a good room am I?

You can come hear my $6000 Ohms.  You will forget about $40k speakers. 
Also I’ll settle for beer or Ripple.

The three speakers Erik identifies as having sounded good in "mediocre" rooms are all speakers which have relatively smooth off-axis response as well as other characteristics which generally result in good in-room response: The Vandersteen Model 7, the Sonus Faber Stradivari, and the magnificent Snell Acoustics Type A. In other words, these are not three random speakers that Erik’s ears picked out - they are three speakers which start out doing some important things right when it comes to room interaction.

If placed in a larger and more theoretically ideal room, the main beneficial differences would be:

1. Increased time delay between the first-arrival sound and the onset of the lateral reflections, and a generally increased decay time. This results in less degradation from early reflections as well as less "small room signarture", so we hear more of the acoustic signature on the recording, and less of the playback room.

2. The bass would be smoother because the larger room would result in greater modal density, which results in more numerous and smaller (and therefore less audible) room-interaction peaks and dips.

Wouldn’t it be nice if these attributes could be grafted into our typical smaller room? How would we go about doing so?

1. Let’s take the fairly wide and uniform radiation pattern of the speakers Erik likes, and chop it in half. Let’s aim half of the energy (now in a considerably narrower pattern) at the listening area, and aim the other half well away from the listening area, such that it bounces off the room boundaries a time or two before arriving. This does two things: It reduces the amount of energy in the earliest (most likely to be detrimental) reflections, and also pushes the "center of gravity" of the reflections back in time, approximating what would happen in a larger room.

2. Various techniques for improving the in-room performance in the bass region exist, so I’ll leave it at that for now.

Room interaction matters a lot to me so I am commercially involved with speakers which have these sorts of attributes. The ones which would qualify as "megaspeakers" (using the $40k yardstick) are SoundLab fullrange electrostats.

Anyway I do not subscribe to the school of thought which says that it’s up to the homebuyer to own a megaroom and up to the acousticians to make the megaroom work for the megaspeakers. In my opinion good room interaction starts at the loudspeakers design stage, whether those speakers be "mega" or otherwise. Kudos to Richard Vandersteen, Franco Serblin, and Peter Snell for paying attention to room interaction.

Duke

so much so that the 11 band EQ centers are not octave based but are centered on typical residential room modes....

some thinking....went into that....

great post Duke

Duke will be familiar with these. I have a pair of what I'd classify as megaspeakers, although not high tech. I bought these 20 years ago, (in storage) because of this crazy world circumstances (blah blah) I've been looking for a sizable room to move to. JBL 4676a two-way (4550 bottom cab) fully original top condition. I have Wavelength Cardinal XS (300B) and Wavelength 45 Silver amps. Recently got Marchand 2-way (tube, ext PS) crossover. I am very interested in any comments, ideas or feedback, etc.