I recently decided to tweak my home theater system to improve the sound quality, after reading the REQ tutorials. Dug out an old laptop to run it, figured the setup mic that came with my Onkyo TX-NR656 AVR would work, and got to measuring. Ran into issues with the HDMI drivers not recognizing anything beyond stereo, had problems with gain structure from the mic, screwed up and measured more than one channel at once, wondered why it was measuring mostly flat on the first try, then realized I'd left the AVR room EQ enabled the whole time.
Decided to just go with the AccuEQ correction since it's apparently not entirely horrible, then got to the sub crawl. Put the sub in my preferred couch seat, ran the 10-200Hz annotated sweep from audiocheck.net on repeat, went to the 5 or so possible sub locations in the living room, and realized the response was most even where the sub had already been for the last two years... right behind the sectional, in the middle of the long wall. (
#2)
Then I put on the low frequency localization tracks, and discovered my threshold is about 70Hz in this room. I then ran AccuEQ setup one more time, tweaked the crossovers, tried to remember what they had been before, and realized that the afternoon's work had left me almost exactly where I'd started. (
#3!) Apparently the basic guidelines I'd followed when first setting it all up had been decent.
Now, this isn't a particularly (or even slightly, by audiophile standards) expensive setup - just 5.1 out of that budget AVR with the center, front floorstanding, surround bookshelf, and sub from the Pioneer Andrew Jones line, connected with 12ga wire from CableMatters and decent banana plugs (maybe $2000 all-in). However, playing some of my favorite music through Plex up-mixed with Dolby Surround sounds very enjoyable to me (or even, gasp, with all-channel stereo). The Dream Theater Live at Budokan Blu-ray with native 5.1 was excellent the other night as well.
Of course there are things I'd like to change - like adding a second sub (vetoed by my wife at least until we renovate the bathrooms), separating the fronts to the appropriate width (impossible without putting one in the middle of the walking path), or maybe adding some height speakers just to see what that sounds like. But for a system in a living room with lots of bookshelves and upholstered furniture, used primary for watching TV and movies, I'm quite happy. Maybe I can't call myself a "true audiophile" yet if I'm 90%+ satisfied for less than the price of a few mortgage payments.