I’m not as concerned about reviewer’s rooms as many others here.
Yes, of course room acoustics affect speaker performance. It’s not for nothing room EQ is all the rage these days. However...I’m less in to hand-wringing over the photos of reviewers rooms for these reason:
Per the work of Floyd Toole and others, speaker room interactions are more unreliable in the bass, but nonetheless Toole has explained that the emphasis on room acoustics is sometimes overstated. This is because our brains have evolved to "listen through" the acoustics of a room to perceive the direct character of a sound source. That’s why we generally easily identify the character of people’s voices in a vast array of real-iife acoustic scenarios. If the surrounding acoustic information so baffled our brains that sources had no defining reliable characteristics, our hearing wouldn’t have been of much use.
I have found this to be true in my own experience auditioning speakers. I’m a "speaker nut" and when I’m on a speaker hunt my auditioning is wide-ranging (even traveling to hear different speakers). Through careful listener positioning - taking various positions to listen, careful speaker placement, I’ve easily been able to get the gist of a speaker’s character in pretty much every room. I have NEVER been surprised by the sound of a speaker I heard in one room, when I heard it in another. I mean, I even auditioned the Harbeth speakers in a room that was literally a gigantic open warehouse room, and yet I simply placed my listening position and speaker arrangement as I have in my 15 ’ x 13’ room at home...and I heard the same essential sound as I heard when I got the speakers in to my room.
So it is quite possible to get a good take on speakers in a variety of different rooms.
It reminds me of the time I heard MBL 101 speakers which I’d become obsessed with. I was able to hear them at a TAS reviewer’s home who had a notoriously, hilariously tiny listening room. I mean, closet-sized with BIG MBL omnis. It was the BEST I have ever heard those things sound. Absolutely incredible. And the descriptions he gave in his MLB reviews were right on regarding the pluses and minuses of that speaker.
Finally, I don’t just take some single review as gospel. Like many, I think, I tend to gain a level of trust with a reviewer insofar has I’ve noted he/she is listening and noticing things I care about sonically. And insofar as his descriptions of speakers I am familiar with have been accurate. And further, I triangulate the impressions with what other reviewers have written, and what other audiophiles have reported.
Very often these converge quite nicely.
So for instance I have found Fremer to be quite accurate in his descriptions of speakers I’ve owned or have auditioned. Even Herb Reichert has been extremely accurate to what I’ve heard. For instance his comparison of Harbeth with Joseph Audio speakers, both of which I’ve owned, got right to the gist of exactly the character differences I heard.
Finally, when it comes to correlating what reviewers write about speakers, for instance in Stereophile, while you can always find embarrassing moments of a mismatch with the measurements, generally speaking I’ve noticed that the reviews tend to track fairly well with what JA measures. Very often certain characteristics cited by the reviewer show up in the measurements. (Fremer is actually pretty good there too).
A good reviewer may not describe a speaker as precisely as measurements, but they can often give the gist of "what it actually sounds like" quite well. IMO.