All of that is true. So speakers really are the make or break item in a system. As Shady pointed out in his latest BMR review, and I have maintained for years, that the better the speakers, the more room agnostic they are. Good speakers are highly room agnostic and you don't have to plaster odd panels all over the place. You don't see any of those in my rooms. Not only that I don't use any "room" Eq software. I have no need of Audyssey Dirac or any of them.
I have heard and installed speakers that were definitely better than the rest of the electronics in many rooms and the better the speakers, the less the other stuff mattered, as long as the amplifier could power them well. I don't test amplifiers- if I don't think it will handle the low Z of some speakers, I'll find something that will be easier for the amp but with the caveat that better speakers may have dips that an older, less capable amplifier might like. I'm also happy that I took a college-level acoustics class because it gives me a lot more info to work with when it comes to entering a room for the first time, learning how the homeowner wants to use a system and whether the acoustics will allow it to happen without a fight. Most of the local shops/integrators don't bother trying to move to a speaker that's better-suited to the space and I was talking with the regional manager of a major speaker company about the system someone sold, that was installed in a nearby state. Terrible sound, the homeowner isn't happy and the tiny room has four subwoofers with speakers that are just overkill. I won't name names, but if the salesperson worked for me, we would be having a fairly long conversation about this one- that equipment never should have left the store as a package for the room in question.
As much as we like to say that tubes are old tech and should be abandoned, the system in the store I mentioned that sells Audio Research, Focal and other stuff I hate sounded really good, but I wasn't going to switch things around in order to hear the difference.
