High End System Building. How important is the matching, cabling and room? Thoughts ?

@immatthewj i understand how you feel. I too have the components and synergy to overcome my room and I’m happy. Yes having a good acoustic room is great but that will never happen for some of us. So the better components and synergy the better the sound I get. 

I created my own room, it takes me 2 years of experiments...

A serious acoustician cannot make it without a month of work ...

Paying a company to do it is not serious ...

They will not seat there and listening ; they will run a program , put many panels on the walls and called it job done ...

I am not surprized by your post ...

But concluding about this that room acoustics dont matter so much is completely wrong ..

Acoustics ask for experiments time , company sell panels and dont have time nor ears ...A room /system is specific in his needs...No easy formula is optimal....

I and several fellow audiophiles with good listening skills and systems have spent good money on treating our rooms with all manner of acoustic treatments. In two specific cases folks paid big money for a room acoustics company to come in and professionally treat the rooms. In the end, the rooms sounded better with all the “stuff “ taken out. I experienced the same thing about 13 years ago.

Honestly folks. Some of us can’t do a thing about our rooms. But we can work on the other areas. Better components , synergy , cabling. Picking the right speakers  and speaker designs for the room you have. Some can change their rooms. But many can’t. But we can still have great sounding systems in the rooms we do have. 

@mahgister you may disagree, but I stand by my experience and experiences. Also, like you, I have experimented for many years with room treatments and vibration control. Not a newbie at this by a long shot. Some rooms are just fine as is with furnishings, the particular speakers used and how they are placed. My examples are more than one off situations that did not work because the installers were not good at their craft. They are examples supporting the fact that room treatments are not a universal cure all or improvement. 

I concur with your anecdote content : a room can be already relatively good , even if in my opinion it is the exception, and may needed less acoustic content than others, i concur with you on the fact that non professional acoustic treatment can become too heavy and detrimental; where we differ is in the fact that a completely  dedicated optimal acoustic room is the same as a relatively good one ...

To reach some optimal for some ears ( the owner ears) and for specific system  , this task ask for something ONLY a pro ascoustician generally  can do , with esthetics and optimal results  and at a very high cost because  this is necessary to reach optimal high end results...

It is my experience after my heavy transformation of my past room with among other things a distributed grid of 100 Helmholtz variously tuned  resonators of different size from few inches to 8 feet , an experiment impossible to do esthetically at low cost and in any living room ... Thats what i talked about speaking of optimal results and not only of  relatively good results and about  about the very few already good room which we must not conflate with optimal one ...

I only  wanted in my post to make the point than the usual habit  in audio threads of  thinking  that a room is "good" , which may be relatively true in a low % of room , for many reasons related to acoustic content, dimensions, geometry and topology , this habit is generally underestimating what is "good"  means and what is optimal and what it means ...

Thats my point about the general importance of acoustics which is experienced by very few people , because no one transform his living room and not even his audio room in a MESS and  and an unesthetical at low cost; or almost no one transform his dedicated room with a pro acoustician by re-design  in it at 100,000 bucks esthetically; which is the cost for the job by a pro ...

Ask mike lavigne about the cost of his "optimal" room ...😁

Then you are not wrong  in your post and i believe you because i experimented with it but we must not confuse a badly done acoustic with a mere relatively  good one  and this one with  an optimal one ... There is three cases here not two ... And almost all rooms needed to be optimized ( 90 %) ... But  most people knowing it or not, anyway  live very well with relatively bad room , if not bad , then they live  with   relatively good room which is the minority case but very few live with optimized room ...

The problem is the general lack of experience with astonishing room and the underestimation of dedicated acoustics over costly upgrade of gear to compensate for a problem 90% of audiophiles cannot even imagine ...

How many people say what i say here , insisting on this difference and the crucial importance of acoustic ? Not many, most argue about a few walls panels ,  and those who did dont advocate for the extreme position i take ... I exagerate and i am wrong or i am right ...Pick your opinion...😁 It is ok ...

But one fact will not change , most people cannot and never could have experimented enough to know about this essential fact : acoustics rule ...This cost a lot of money way more than most high end system , if not, it makes a mess of the room save if you redesign it yourself with very good craftmanship in carpentry and in acoustics...It cost a lot of time , and almost no one not already retired can do it ... I was retired ...

My dedicated  room  at the end of this optimization process was an apparent looking mess for the eyes not for the ears ... 😁 My cost was few years of experiments and one year full time ( i am retired ) but i am not a carpenter  nor am i  very talented with my hand and i had no money ... But i learned what acoustics "means" ...

Acoustics is not the cherry on the gear cake at all, it is the reverse ; the system is the cherries and the icing on the cake itself (acoustics) ... Thats my truth ...The reverse of general audio forum truth ...

At the end i was so surprized by my results with  the soundscape around the listening position , with a low cost system, that myself will not even believe it...Thats is optimal acoustic...Not just relatively good or wrong which is a fact almost always unbeknonwst to the owner because the potential of a dedicated room is very high ...

But this truth of mine is not a "good news" for most people ... Because most will never enjoy this fact ...Then it is not an appealing truth ...It is better to believe the marketing appeal to upgrade and pay for 200, 000 bucks gear system in a living room because marketing assure us that this is way "better" than a 100,000 bucks one in the same living room  ... Suffice to read any audio forum to observe this "faith" reflecting the underestimation of acoustics....😊

I wish you the best new year for you and your family....

@mahgister you may disagree, but I stand by my experience and experiences. Also, like you, I have experimented for many years with room treatments and vibration control. Not a newbie at this by a long shot. Some rooms are just fine as is with furnishings, the particular speakers used and how they are placed. My examples are more than one off situations that did not work because the installers were not good at their craft. They are examples supporting the fact that room treatments are not a universal cure all or improvement.