Apart from the obvious conclusion that room and placement can make a huge difference in your listening enjoyment, I'm starting to believe that interaction with the room (ignoring how good the room is) explains another mystery that's always bothered me.
I have often seen a significant difference between reviewer comments about bass response and what the frequency response charts from an anechoic chamber show, even when reviewer and listening room are the same. It's not at all unusual for a speaker with smooth response down to ~40 Hz to be described as having weaker bass than a speaker which starts to roll off at ~70 Hz and is ~10dB down at 40 Hz (eg Soundstage reviews of PSB Image T45 vs Revel F12, where the T45 bass extension goes quite a bit deeper on the charts but the F12 is described as having deeper bass).
http://www.soundstage.com/revequip/psb_image_t45.htmhttp://www.soundstage.com/revequip/revel_concerta_f12.htmIt's almost as if the reviewer only hears the bass from the drivers and not from the port(s), which doesn't seem to make sense unless ports and drivers are sufficiently far apart that they interact differently with the room... although there's the obvious argument that having drivers & ports separated is good because it can reduce the impact of room reinforcement by dividing the bass energy across multiple points each with a slightly different room response.
I don't remember worrying about all this stuff when I was building speakers... but back then we had just learned that restaurants were feeding "french fry smell" into the air and suspected that end audio stores might be using some kind of mild hallucinogenic in the HVAC system to make their systems sound so different from ours.
