All speakers have a little EQ built in

Sadly, those speaker level adjustments were often unreliable over time and the cause of much frustration.

Modern speakers are not designed for an anechoic chamber, but the measurements may be done that way in order to properly set crossover points and alignment. No competent speaker designer I know of would build a speaker for an anechoic chamber.

I do however agree that good tone controls in your preamp are wonderful. I’ve had gear with good and bad tone controls, so I can understand the reluctance of some listeners to use them again, but good ones exist!

No one's room and no recording or hearing is perfect.  Let's be good to our enjoyment of music and use tone controls!

Yes for sure. 
 

I tend to think drivers that need a lot of smoothing through crossover parts get robbed of some of their sensitivity which results in heat build up and loss of dynamics. Good drivers are super important, far more important than fancy box materials and crossover parts (all things matter though). 
 

As for target curves I am on board with Harman’s studies of about 5db in room slope from 200khz-20khz. That seems to work well in my room. Oddly I think Harman’s headphone curve is crap and far too bass heavy.  

@erik_squires I appreciate your enthusiasm for tone controls.  Early in my journey I appreciated the option to by-pass tone controls; why, I appreciate simplicity.

And in this journey personal preference makes a difference and its wonderful there are so many options.

@overthemoon  - There are actually bad tone controls.  Manufacturers would implement excellent analog stages and then glue on tone controls (or headphone amps) as after-thoughts.  So, I can understand that there have been bad examples, there is also gear with consistently good examples.  Luxman for instance makes excellent transparent tone controls (but not headphone amps).

@james633 - That may be true. In most designs the raw sensitivity of the tweeters is higher than the woofers and/or the woofers need EQ to boost the bass by cutting the top of their response down, all of which forces us to lower the tweeter levels considerably.

The end result is a speaker which needs considerably more watts than it would otherwise, but we usually compensate for this with monster amps... so... 😂