I am willing to bet that if DS-21's wife would approve it, he'd be all over a specialized room and system with all the bells and whistles. I get the feeling he's rationalizing, justifying what he has.
No true audiophile thinks backed-up-against-the-wall, no treatments, etc, is superior to a fully thought out, measured, treated.. dedicated system. And as far as eyesore, well, there are some rather attractive treatments to be had if you have the cash, artistically made traps, beautiful high end diffusers, artwork laden panels.. to say room treatments are ugly is to only speak of basic, utilitarian treatments.
And as far as slamming boutique parts, well I for one have had a lot of experience, in my system, with different capacitors, crossovers, etc, and to say it's some kind of con leads me to believe you have no personal experience with said "boutique" parts.
Lastly, DS-21, you may or may not be familiar with Bruno Putzeys, the designer of the new class d Ncore amps that are pretty much revolutionizing what is possible in terms of performance, price, size, efficiency, etc..
Anyway, this man is considered to be at the forefront of class d technology and has had a long career designing gear, starting as a tube amp designer when only a teenager.
He says, and I'm paraphrasing, that we still don't know everything there is to know about how audio gear works, and we still don't have a complete toolkit for measuring phenomena. He says we have the vast majority of it, but for a handful of things, we still require listening tests.
There are still discoveries to be made.
I've been in this hobby not nearly as long as you, but I'm already experienced enough to tell you you're wrong.
...and let me get this right? AVR? Disqualified.
