Back on the topic of acoustics - because the end product of "what we hear and enjoy" goes through so much processing and interpretation in our brains,
This is called psychoacoustics...
We can even adress some psychoacoustics factors in a room in a way or in another... I did it...
These psychoacoustics factors matter as much if not more than any dac or amplifier or speakers design...
For example: All stereo systems are plagued by crosstalk effect... An upgrade of a piece of gear will not correct that... Most people had no idea of the acoustic information losses in all stereo system anyway...
The different way any piece of gear process the acoustic information matter less than crosstalk effects most of the times if the gear pieces are minimally relatively good to begin with because the crosstalk information loss is huge... The only exception to this will be comparing the information loss from a bad low cost system compared with one good high end one in the same living room ...
I think it’s possible there are significant personal differences in "how much" someone hears the room versus the primary sound source, proportionally.
This make no sense to me because the source is not a turntable or a digital files, these are mere processing tools, it is the recording acoustics information content resulting from choices of the engineer using his mics craftmanship to record in a specific room; my systems/room must translate this for my ears and give me back this "source" of acoustic timbre, spatial information in an immersive faithfull way.
Second i dont hear my room , i hear because my room is acoustically optimized, i hear the acoustic information of the original recording... For example i hear the Organ recorded in a church as if i was in the church not in my room..i dont hear my speakers as if the sound was coming from them at all, they disapear completely and the same must be true for headphones,but it is very rare for headophone to be the case... Perhaps the RAAL will do it better though compared to my Akg K340 modified as they did it already in a realistic acceptable speaker like way...No other headphones i used do it at all ...
You speak as if the gear pieces choices were the main factor. Marketing want to convince us that it is such. It is false even if for sure all pieces of gear are different and their synergy matter... But gear choices is the starting point of audiophiles, as it was for me; but in truth the room and all acoustics factors (ears-head measures included ) is the beginning and the end and what really matter the most...
I think it’s possible there are significant personal differences in "how much" someone hears the room versus the primary sound source, proportionally.