"The room can totally wreck, or make, a system"

Preaching to the choir. In my case anyway. For anyone who thinks they have as good a system as can be regardless of cost in an untreated room, pay attention to what hilde45 posted. I only listened to 2/3 of it because I already experienced all of it. A properly built and treated room will get you to a higher level of audio nirvana that you ever thought possible. Equipment alone will only get you a fraction of that.

@baylinor Thanks for affirming. Danny's video is not the best of these sorts of things, but it's recent. He has some good ideas about how to do it on the cheap just to start out and see what difference it makes.

I'm posting it because this lesson (of the room's importance) was so helpful in keeping me from going down rabbit holes about this or that amp, speaker, etc. I suppose part of the hobby's fun is just being oblivious to the room's contribution and then chasing gear, arguing about how it sounds, and never quite getting one's bearings. Then again, there are many people posting who are dying to "get off the constant cycle of buying and selling gear, chasing Nirvana." It's pretty clear you can't find your way out of the forest without a compass. Learning my room became my compass.

I agree 100%. I've had a system in a number of different room sizes, shapes, ceiling heights, etc over the many years that I've been involved in this hobby. In some locations, I could hear the issues. Wasn't smart enough to do room treatment.

My son is a musician and has recorded in a studio and done his own recordings. He's way more knowledgable about the techie end of those things. He was absolutely convinced that I would benefit from room equalization, so I downloaded a trial version of Dirac Live and bought a recommended mic. He measured my room and we found that it actually measured pretty flat.  We tried the room equalization and didn't like what it did. It seemed to flatten the sound. 

At one point, we had the mic near the sitting position and we were getting a spike in the graph (I can't remember if it was a spike or a dip). It was weird. I had my laptop on the coffee table in front of me. I closed the laptop and the spike/dip went away. Pretty surprising because the mic was quite a bit higher than the laptop. 

I'm sure I could benefit from room treatment, but I'd need to get someone knowledgeable to help me figure it out. 

Best $500 dollars that I ever spent was DIYing a case of 703 Owen’s-Corning rigid fiberglass panels. 

I agree. Last year I bought GIK diffusers, absorbers, and corner bass traps. Made a huge difference in the performance of my system.