That's why so many audiophiles view the room as the enemy and spend a fortune on absorptive treatments that makes their room acoustics resemble ever so closely the inside of an anech oic chamber. There are two basic problems with this assertion. First, with two-channel audio, both the reverberant cues and the direct sound are reproduced from a plane in front of the listener. This is most unnatural. Therefore, in a typical room diffusion is much more important than absorption.
Some sound energy needs to arrive at the listening seat delayed relative to the direct sound.
Another crucial consideration is that in an average room, the soundfield at the listening seat is a combination of direct and reflected energy. Even at 9-feet from the speakers the soundfield is already dominated by reflected sound. This clearly means that careful attention needs to be paid to the power response or the off-axis output of the speaker as a function of frequency. A typical two-way speaker is omnidirectional in the ba ss and starts to beam as the woofer struggles to meet the tweeter in the upper midrange. As a result, reflected sound that arrives at the listening seat is deficient in midrange energy and the soundfield where your ears happen to be is tonally colored by the speaker's power response.