Quality sound quality testing is rare, mostly due to the fact that most of it is more marketing than reality (see beats headphones for example). Even the audiop

Quality sound quality testing is rare, mostly due to the fact that most of it is more marketing than reality (see beats headphones for example). Even the audiophile units often perform the same as a simple yamaha unit, but boy are they pretty, and made with exotic woods, solid silver, and handmade german capacitors. Concerning room tuning: A similar issue happened about 20 years ago with the advent of this tech in car stereos. It isn't at all new, I still own an Eclipse head unit with the feature. It will play a frequency sweep from the speakers, and used the mics to localize (fade and balance), eq, and normalize the volume. The problem is, as the listener, we almost always prefer our idiosyncratic music prefrences over a "flat" or generically "enhanced" eq and dynamics curve. And at least in the high quality (as opposed to SPL/loudness) domain of car audio, we have mostly moved back to manual adjustment. Many high end users still use sweeps and meters, easier than ever with smartphones, but still fine tune by ear. Not altogether different than the tube vs solid state argument. Solid state amps are measurably cleaner and clearer, with less distortion, and greater frequency range. But the type of harmonic distortion produced by tube amplification is almost universally preferred by listeners when tested. For humans, tune for the human, not the room.