I agree with you 100% on this.... If you have a fully treated room and have very little room type issues, I think the upgrade to something of this caliber might become more marginal. ARC is a very powerful room processor. There is no question that it will provide an improvement over any receiver, but how much is again very room dependent... The investment here is and can be a very hard pill to swallow.
I know that when my carpet comes in, there will be again another very large improvement for me...
Sorry to chime in a little late.
I am not fortunate enough to be able to decide wether or not to carpet my living room which doubles up as my listening area. Part of the reason to buy the Statement was its Arc capabilities and its dual processor per cahnnel capability.
I was conditioned to: no cables or speakers can be visible, the equipment had to be hidden and it all had to come out of one corner of the room. That is very tough in an a concrete building apartment, even with some furniture and a large rug in between.
IMHO, the D2 WYREDFOR SOUND 7X250 were a perfect match. Out of the box, no tweaking except speaker delays, the system was superb.
I am not sure how much of a difference the carpet can and will make in your system (I am anxious to hear your comments when you have it in). I played with the default gain parametrs and ran room correction to 20kHz and I could not tell that 4 of my spekers are in concrete corners, 3 of them right next to building columns. As a matter of fact, if I switched from stero to multichannel, I had to put my ear right up to the speker to tell if I was getting one or the other. The sound field, at least in my setup, is that good. No more boomy echoed bass. Heck, with bookshellf speakers I could not find a way to contain the bass in my system. Audyssey room correction did help but it just could not cope with my problem. It (Arc) is really incredible.
Some people like specs. All I can say is that if you do not trust your ears, the D2 calibration SW provides sound curves for any given setup. You can look at the before and after to see if there is any difference. For me, there was a large difference on paper, although not as large as I had anticipated based on sound improvement.
Despite the room correction capabilities, I need to stress the point that this device sounded great out of the box. You need to start with good sound, regardless of room correction wether it be done through remodeling or software.
Just MHO.
