Feanor:

No the silly line of reasoning is people who think that speaker X only sounds good in THEIR home. The dimwits who say - if it sounds bad in the store it is because the store's room is BAD and that you can't hope to hear how good it is until you take speaker X home.

The presumption is that stores are bad and homes are somehow cure all solutions. That applies to "some" extent to audio shows. I never quite get why these people think they can set up speaker X in their home and achieve better sound than the speaker X head designer setting up a room at a dealer (which by the way is often the case).

Good speakers should be designed to operate in a variety of rooms. Hence why the "best" loudspeakers that I have heard sound very very similar (and also good to phenomenal) across a wide range of rooms sizes and shapes. And some speakers I don't like that much also sound strikingly similar in every room I have tried them in. This is why many people who audition a Sonus Faber hear Sonus Faber the same way. 50 different people auditioning it in 50 different rooms and in most cases all of them draw the exact same conclusion - generally - polite laid back loudspeaker. Your preference for polite or laidback could be valid but in general most people hear them the exact same way - dealer show room or at home.

And no one is mistaking a Quad for a B&W - regardless of the room or if it has bass traps or equalizers because both speakers may produce a 1khz frequency at X decibels and sound completely different due to the sonic signature of the actual driver - a metal tweeter versus a stat or a ribbon or silk dome or what have you.

The room can be worked - if the speaker is any good and it's designed to work in the room size then it will sound as good or damn close in your house as it does at a show or a dealer. If it sounds bad there then why would it suddenly get better at home?

Granted most dealers I have been to suck - maybe I am just lucky to have been to competent dealers who actually know stuff about music, electronics, set-up, and products - and can repair everything.

Lastly - also tired of forumers who blather on about bad dealers when all they do is buy stuff off the net fiddle with it at home and then declare that what I heard at a dealer is bad because the dealer room is bad when they've never walked into said dealer.

I pointed out that audiofederation is an example of a dealer that is in a REAL house for the purposes of being a real room that can be typically found in the region.

Maybe if just once you actually bothered to make a trip and hear a quality audio system just once in your life you would get the picture.