Sweet Room

[David A]

I'd rather have the espresso than electronic room correction.   

But DavidA: what if you could have BOTH?

I'll treat that as a serious question  

I wouldn't have both. I'd rather have the espresso supply plus an acoustically treated room or, preferably, the espresso supply with a room designed by an architect/acoustic engineer.

Electronic room correction doesn't correct the room, it compensates for it. All of the room problems that you're trying to correct are still present but the system is modifying the signal sent to the speakers to turn it into something far from accurate that the room problems will turn back into something that measures a lot more accurately. It may solve a lot of things that are annoying you about the sound you hear but it does absolutely nothing to actually fix the problems.

A room which has been effectively treated acoustically has fewer and smaller problems than an untreated room and sounds better in my admittedly limited experience than an electronically corrected room. An acoustically designed listening room, and I've listened now in 4 such rooms, is like listening in a treated room but better and without the visual intrusions that a lot of acoustic treatments present. Good acoustic treatment/design allows you to adjust the presentation of the music in ways that make the result more like what you hear in a good concert hall or performance space than simply delivering a result that measures as better or more accurate. I've got 2 systems, a stereo HT setup in my living room with electronic correction and a stereo music system in a dedicated listening room which has been acoustically treated. Listening to music in the acoustically treated room is a much more enjoyable experience. Things sound very good in the HT system with electronic correction but that system doesn't deliver a  result that reminds me of being present at an actual live performance in the way that the music system in the acoustically treated room does.

That said, the electronically corrected system coexists quite happily with a comfortable living room in which you can sit and chat with visitors in a nice environment. The acoustically treated room would not make a good living room and the 8 large freestanding acoustic panels distributed around the room are visually imposing plus everything else about the room is arranged to provide lots of free space around speakers placed well away from walls which is something else that's difficult to achieve in a living room. It's a room which is arranged so every seat faces the speakers and there's no way people can sit facing each other to chat which is something that the furniture setup in the living room is arranged to allow. Dedicated listening rooms don't make good living rooms but electronic correction can deliver a very welcome improvement to the sound in a living room without the adverse visual impacts of acoustic treatment. If I had to live with a single system in a living room I'd probably go for electronic correction unless I could afford to build a house with a living room designed by an architect or acoustics consultant.

That's my answer. I think electronic correction is a good solution but it's not my preferred solution to the acoustic problems of a listening room. Regardless, whether you go for electronic correction or acoustic treatment/design of the room, there currently isn't any way to deliver the best result at every point in the room. You can get great results in a part of the room and good results in other parts but there will also be parts of the room where the results are much poorer. I do think acoustic treatment/design allows you to reduce the gap between the best result and the worst result in the room by actually reducing the scale of the problems in the room.