My apologies, lanwuk - my post came off sounding insulting, and I didn't intend that.
I know *you* didn't say anything about Ethan Winer being anything - I'm bemused in general. Lots of people link to his site these days, just as they do to Bob Katz' site whenever something comes up about digital theory. Bob Katz happens to be an extremely knowledgeable guy and an excellent engineer; I just have a similar reaction about people referring others to his site to try and end all discussions about subtle digital issues. I've been reading about and working with this stuff for years, and I know enough about it to know that I know very little - which is way ahead of most people who post on the internet about digital audio. (Usually the giveaway is when someone writes "to properly dither" in a sentence; that hideous split infinitve is usually a cue not to listen to the rest of what they're saying. :) )
Anyway, I do stand by what I said about room acoustics: give me good speakers in a *normal* (not totally messed up) room over lousy ones in a good room. If the bass is totally screwed up to the point you're describing, then of course you need to trap it. That's not terribly difficult to do, though. You can make pretty much any room reasonably workable just by trapping the bass, and also soaking up excess reverb (preferably at the front and definitely not the sides). It's possible to work wonders without using official acoustic materials (although I have some ASC baffles up, and they're great). For stereo, that is - I'm not set up for surround and don't know about that.
Note that I'm not talking about the kind of serious room tweaking you'd do for a commercial-grade monitoring (mixing/mastering) environment. That requires a lot of work, expertise, and money - a good ten times what the kind of speakers we're talking about here run. A good friend of mine who now runs a studio in a small resort town moved there after losing his studio lease in a larger area. He literally cried when he heard the new place (which is in two rooms of his house). Several weeks and thousands of dollars later, his monitoring and tracking rooms are awesome - although I personally happen to prefer a more live monitoring environment. But of course there isn't only one kind of room that's good for monitoring.
By the way, people making the argument for acoustic treatment usually point out that you can easily sweep and measure 15dB frequency lumps all over the place caused by the acoustics of the room. Speakers only have 3dB swings at worst, therefore fixing the room is more important.
To repeat myself: the problem with that argument is that the brain compensates for what seem like hideous problems in the room. Measurement mics are not human ears!
But I certainly don't want to argue against room treatment - we definitely agree that it's very important.
