price points vs. room treatment

Mizrachi, It all depends on what you expect to achieve with your system. As a pratical matter, if you do not/cannot set your speakers up to their best advantage and compensate for you room's acoustics I wouldn't spend much money on my equipment or speakers - you will never hear it to its best advantage. If you value neutral tonality, you'll never hear it. If you value soundstaging you'll never hear it. If all you want is to hear music and are not interested in the stereo artifacts I would get some small floorstanders, place them against the wall where convenient and buy an equalizer to adjust the tonality to compensate for your preferences, sit back and enjoy.
Nrchy's comments are right on point. If you can bring your speakers out into the room away from the walls and treat the first reflection points as needed you can get excellent sonics from mid-priced components. Room treatment can be done at low cost using ordinary domestic stuff - furniture, rugs, plants, hangings, books/cases etc. If you want to use small speakers, use stands, to bring the speakers up to ear level, but you don't need to spend big bucks here either unless you have high quality components and an excellent room that will allow you to hear the difference.

True, room treatments will have significant influences on your system. The most important speaker factor, way before room acoustics, is their positioning. If you didn't do a thing to treat your room, but could position your speakers perfectly, you'd be way ahead, rather than an acoustically perfect room with speakers flush against the wall, or the like. Placement AND room tweaks/treatments? Audio Nirvana. Or, the inherent maximum from your system. Newbee and Nrchy speak zee truth.

I would check out the products by Eighth Nerve. It baffles me why putting up these pillow looking things makes such a difference, but it does. They are relatively cheap, easily reversible, and work.

Some speakers are meant to be up against the wall. Maybe not many, and I don't know which, but I'd check those out...I recall Art Dudley saying that Moth Chicadas or something like that were supposed to be positioned not only against the wall but in a corner and they did work best that way. So, all is not lost. And even if you don't hear the system to its "best" advantage, you can hear it to a good advantage... good luck

newbee, you are correct in pointing out that sans treatment you 'll never get the most out of your rig. However, my room is in dire need of treatment, and some areas just ain't gonna get it for money or WAF reasons, but my quality rig still sounds a lot better there than a low or mid budget rig. You gotta take what you can where ya can. As you indicated, getting the speakers away from the side walls, and to a lesser extent the rear wall helped a lot.