Forgive me! It's a broad topic, and one must always choose what to cover in a short internet post. In short I think speaker selection and placement are about a

Forgive me! It's a broad topic, and one must always choose what to cover in a short internet post. In short I think speaker selection and placement are about an order of magnitude or two more important than everything else. If those are the only two things you pay attention to and don't drastically screw the rest up, you'll have a nice sounding system. Room correction (which is also speaker correction) is probably the next most important thing, although well into optional territory IMO. There's lots more that I fuss over, but I don't want people believing that they need a lot of elaborate rituals and room alterations to achieve good sound. It's not true, it's counterproductive, and scares people away from this really fun hobby. =) No EQ on earth will get rid of the reverb in an empty warehouse. [...] So EQs can help, but you should also think about the actual surfaces of the room itself. You're completely correct, but I don't emphasize room issues too much for beginners. Why? In my experience, most residential rooms are actually pretty acoustically decent for a few reasons. 1. They tend to be filled with comfy padded furniture, bookshelves, etc. which do a nice job of breaking up high and mid frequency reflections. 2. The brain already performs a lot of "room correction" and it's particularly good at performing it in familiar spaces like our own homes. 3. Most people's home systems (especially those of beginners) aren't putting out the kind of massive low frequency output that's really troublesome to tame. Of course there is always going to be a room mode or three, usually with a prominent one somewhere in the midbass range.