The Absurdity of it All

Trusting anybody's hearing as a source for audio advice is absurd. Satisfy your own hearing, forget about everyone else.

No 70 year old has a putter that is any good any more.

Dismissing science because it doesn't fit nicely into your scheme is your own mistake to make. Science does not know everything but it's information creates a foundation on which to build further knowledge. In saying , " I don't know," you initiate the first step in the learning process. There is a ton of information about sound perception available that audiophile tend to side step. There is a book that is relatively easy for a lay person to understand, "An Introduction to the Psychology of Hearing" by Brian C J Moore. It is a very good place to start. 

Perkri, The best you can do is to get the bass right at the listening position by doing all those things you mention.  As many here have noticed other than rebuilding your media room the best way to deal with the bass problem is by adding multiple subwoofers. Room treatments come into play at higher frequencies above 250 Hz. 

It is undeniable true that many fine systems are ruined by room acoustics. 

Mahgister, can you show us a picture of your mechanical equalizer? I am not sure what you mean by "tight pressure zone" comparing it to strings on a violin. Maybe you mean tight tension?

kevn, all you describe are aberrations of frequency response. I can make any female voice sibilant by boosting frequencies between 3 and 5 kHz just 2-3 dB. I can remove sibilance just by dropping the same frequencies 2-3 dB  Frequencies between 3 and 8 kHz are responsible for the "brightness" of the sound. This is frequently and incorrectly associated with detail or lack there of. If I were to give two very different speakers, say a Klipsch Cornwall and a Magneplanar 3.7i the exact same frequency response curve they will still sound very different. Even though their tonality is identical their timbre is not. It is in this domain where the best speakers excel. The problem for loudspeakers is that they have to mimic the timbre of a vast array of instruments that make sounds by a vast array of mechanisms. The speakers that are best at it seem to disappear leaving individual instruments hanging in space, 3 dimensions. I remember vividly the first time I heard a loudspeaker system do this. It was Dick Sequerra's Pyramid Metronome 2+2W+Ti system driven by Threshold electronics. The owner was heavily into jazz. I had him put on Waltz for Debby and a holographic image of the Bill Evans trio appeared in space. I was not even stoned at the time. Needless to say my satisfaction with my own system dropped to all time lows. There was no way I could afford equipment like that at the time but it gave me a target to shoot at. I can count the systems on one hand that reached that level of performance in my experience. 

Kevn, You are right there is much more to sound than hearing. There is feeling and that is a real problem for many if not most systems. They do not feel right. There is this one elderly, totally deaf gentleman that listens to music by feeling it. There is a YouTube video on him you might be able to find. At a live performance it is that visceral sensation that adds that extra thrill missing at home. My mission has always been to reproduce that thrill at home but still maintain timbral accuracy. Imaging and accuracy are good things to shoot for but if the system does not feel right it is all to naught.

mahgister, how much experience do you have actually measuring room acoustics and correcting defects with both acoustic management and digital EQ? Do not tell me you can do it with your hearing because no one can even well trained mastering engineers can not EQ an environment by ear. They pull out the measurement microphone. I suggest you buy one. What you will see when you measure your system is a mess.
If there is an exception to my generalization I have not seen or heard it. 
When someone tells me they have "clear" bass that usually means they have almost no bass below 80 Hz. Because if you did without digital EQ the bass would be muddy and confused. 

@stuartk, sorry about my delayed response. The visceral sensation is created by frequencies below 300 Hz. It is in this region that room acoustics cause the most trouble. Go to a rock concert at a large indoor venue and you get very powerful one note bass, boom, boom, boom. Go to an outdoor venue and you get beautiful bass. However, small indoor venues like Jazz clubs and larger indoor venue where acoustics were appropriately managed like Boston's Symphony Hall can give you wonderful sound.  But the small rooms we usually listen to our systems in literally choke the bass below 100 Hz. Getting these frequencies right requires clever acoustic management, a lot of power both amplifier and driver and digital room control. Very few if any speaker systems have the ability to produce bass accurately, they do not go low enough nor can they project that kind of power into a small room listening environment. I hear this all the time, "but, my speakers are rated to go down to 30 Hz." Right, at one meter in an anechoic environment. Put it in a room and you are lucky to get anything with verve below 80 Hz., virtually nothing below 40 Hz. If you try to correct these systems digitally they start distorting because they can't handle the power and many amplifiers just do not have the power to do it. To get it right you have to have a lot of subwoofer power and a lot of amplifier power. A point source system requires at least two 15" or four 12" drivers to do it with reasonable distortion levels. A line source system requires four subs 12" or larger. This will get you to 100 dB with low levels of distortion which is enough to replicate the visceral sensation you get at a concert in a room with good acoustic management. You can play a concert video and feel like you are at the concert and in many ways it is even better than a real concert. You get much better visualization of the musicians, the sound quality is actually better than at most large indoor concert venues and you do not have to deal with parking and crowds.   

cd318, what is going on is we are being screwed, all of us, every last one of us. Our money is being forcibly removed from our pockets and spent on maintaining political power and accumulating wealth usually to make corporations and certain voting blocks happy. We should all be fighting together to stop this. They are getting us to fight instead with each other. We need term limits and campaign finance reform fast before we become a police state. Humans need a reason to perform. Without that reason they devolve into apathy. The second amendment is not about guns. It is about keeping our government at bay. Watch what happens when they are not scared of us any more.