Rives makes a very valid point regarding "the better the speaker".. Regarding passive designs, I think in general the tighter the tolerances on driver matching, crossover tuning, and all the many design elements in a speaker design the more revealing they will likely be to changes in the environment they are placed in.
Logically, if the characteristics of the speaker are fixed, then they will not sound the same under different acoustic environments. By contrast, active speakers that can adapt to their environment by utilizing EQ, DSP, etc. (like Meridian's active DSP models, for example), can compensate quite a bit for less-than-ideal placement or acoustics up to a point.
In the reference manual that came with my Hales Revelation Two's, (a very nice speaker if do say so myself!), there is a very in-depth chapter on finding the best placement in your room and the importance of room acoustics. At the end of the chapter, Paul Hales candidly writes: "as awesome as your Hales loudspeakers are, they will sound bad in a bad room". He obviously has no illusions about the importance of the environment affecting sound quality!
Logically, if the characteristics of the speaker are fixed, then they will not sound the same under different acoustic environments. By contrast, active speakers that can adapt to their environment by utilizing EQ, DSP, etc. (like Meridian's active DSP models, for example), can compensate quite a bit for less-than-ideal placement or acoustics up to a point.
In the reference manual that came with my Hales Revelation Two's, (a very nice speaker if do say so myself!), there is a very in-depth chapter on finding the best placement in your room and the importance of room acoustics. At the end of the chapter, Paul Hales candidly writes: "as awesome as your Hales loudspeakers are, they will sound bad in a bad room". He obviously has no illusions about the importance of the environment affecting sound quality!