I agree with your statement, Fleschler: the room is an extremely important part of the quality. I have used components in 4 rooms: 2 in San Francisco, in which one room was narrow (I didn't know about first reflection points then), but the speakers were at the bottom of the "L" shaped room and therefore had access to the entire apartment. Then moved again and had a room with a concave ceiling back in 1988. That room sounded okay, and I used Sonex (too much) but had stellar imaging. Another room was 13 x 27 with 10 foot ceilings. Got great sound from that. The most recent two are here on the East Coast and the first room was my basement: 23 x 45. Of all the rooms, that one was fantastic, but I had to put RT-13 insulation between the ceiling joists (unfinished basement, joists just as it would be in a ranch built in 1965) and concrete walls and floor. I had to put area rugs in front of the speakers, and hauled the 30 or so tube traps into service. Despite the low ceiling, that room is easily the most transparent. However, I had an addition built onto the house and the new room, while good - and has a 10' ceiling in the new part (8' in the old) is no match for the basement where you could nearly just "drop" the speakers into any area and they sounded better (and this with water pipes and heating ducts overhead and the basement is only 7'6" high to begin with).
I heard my CD player many years ago in the rom of Tom McFaul, who wrote the Meow-Meow cat commercials. His living room is around 30 x 50 (bigger than my mother's ranch) and his setup atrocious, but the speakers he had (cheap Infinitys) had so much open space, they didn't care. Sounded astounding, given his speaker cable was cheap, he didn't even have speaker stands for the speakers AND the speakers were just 'thrown' into the back part of the room (where a grand piano was directly to the side of one speaker).
Room comes first: everything else is the equivalent of 4th place.
I heard my CD player many years ago in the rom of Tom McFaul, who wrote the Meow-Meow cat commercials. His living room is around 30 x 50 (bigger than my mother's ranch) and his setup atrocious, but the speakers he had (cheap Infinitys) had so much open space, they didn't care. Sounded astounding, given his speaker cable was cheap, he didn't even have speaker stands for the speakers AND the speakers were just 'thrown' into the back part of the room (where a grand piano was directly to the side of one speaker).
Room comes first: everything else is the equivalent of 4th place.