I'm of the opinion that while room treatments are definately the best way to get the best possible sound (I've been in SRoode's HT, so I can appreciate what a well treated room can sound like) out of your system, it's definately also the most extreme. My guess is that a good 85 - 90% of house holds with any kind of HT at all in their homes don't know the slightest thing about room treatements. I for one had never even heard the term before I became a member of this board. On the other hand, I'll bet at least 75% of the population that have looked into buying a reciever in the $500 dollar and over range have at least heard about Audyssey.
Audyssey in some form is included in most of those $500 dollar plus recievers, correctly treating a room could cost thousands of dollars... IF the miss's were even to ok things like bass traps in the corners of the room, and huge pannels on the walls and ceilings instead of pictures of the family or other decorative paintings. I don't imagine spending money on such things is a very easy sell to most wives/girlfriends. I mean first you hit them with the notion that you're going to take down all of their decorations... and now you're going to try to convince them to spend HOW MUCH money on these ungodly looking things?
"Honey, didn't the salesman say there was something included inside of that retriever thingy that does all of that stuff for us"???
I say all of that even though I don't use Audyssey, and would love to be able to take down all the pictures and put up treatments similar to what SRoode did. But my point is that realistically this just isn't what is going on in HT's around the world. I mean look at me, I was able to convince my better half that spending $4400 dollars on speakers alone was not insane... but I'll never be able to convince her to take down all of the pictures and hang treatments up, even if I do finally get my way and put some bass traps in the corners... it just ain't happening fella's!
Therefore any speaker company that say's, "turn the Audyssey off and treat your room" is speaking to a very, very small percentage of his clients. And alienating the rest. I can't blame them for saying it, because in my opinion it's definately true! I just feel it's a mistake to expect everyone to be able to do this. I would be a little bit like Frederick Henderson coming on the TV and saying, "you know America, if I were you I wouldn't even consider buying a GM vehicle unless it was a fully loaded Corvette... anything less than a decked out Corvette falls short of the best performance GMC has to offer".
Hey that would be an accurate statement, but the number of GMC customers who are willing to take all of the trade-off's a Corvette comes with (low fuel mileage, only two seats, high insurance, terrible in the snow and ice, very high sticker price, etc...) aren't all that many. So while there's nothing wrong with praising how wonderful your Corvette line is, it would be wise to let your customers know that a Malibu is ok too.
