Yes. Yes. Yes. I bought some used Meridian active speakers for a problematic, irregular space with lots of stone and glass where I couldn’t use conventional room treatments. Custom filters from HAF have made it all work.
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I’m lazy, NAD and dirac. Really impressed with the results. I invested in full Dirac as I have a c658 and active speakers too elsewhere.
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I’d join the mini-consensus that judicious DSP combined with reasonably priced, well made kit can sound very good, even in hostile listening environments.
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- There is no built in mic.
- The room response uses your iphone mic. You just wander around your listening space waving your phone around for a minute. You can see the before and after response curves on your phone which is then wirelessly transferred to a “Platin” WiSA hub. Sounds crazy but it really works.
- There are USB “tunings” you can download from the Buchardt website. The speakers, for example, can be configured as 3 way or 2 1/2 way or flat or bass heavy depending on taste (they go amazingly low). In my small room there was way too much (rear firing) bass so I configured 2 1/2 way with a flat response.
- The final touch depending on your subjective preferences is a little touch of roon parametric equalization. I found I preferred a little 2 DB midrange lift to accentuate voice and acoustic instruments.
- Yes. I chose them because they were Danish so that the “Scandi” design goes with the “Scandi” decor in the “Scandi” cottage.
The system is limited to 24/96k but that is fine with me. I did play around with DSD but personally got no benefit. TBH I have grown quite skeptical about high rez. At my age I can reliably distinguish 192 MP3 and redbook but not 320 MP3 and redbook. For the most part I cannot distinguish 16/44.1 and 24/96. Sometimes I do notice a difference with Qobuz but it is usually because there is some difference in the mastering.
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Very interesting.
Toole lets it slip that the speaker that measured 3rd in his 1986/2003 blind test (double?) was this monster:
https://us.kef.com/explore-kef/kef-museum/1970s/reference-series-model-1052-1979-87
Not sure how they hid that 
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Heh heh. 10 chars.
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Toole’s video above is long but worth the time.
He points out that the whole audio reproduction cycle most be considered in its entirety from studio monitoring to mastering to domestic systems. He finds a major issue with the relatively poor quality of many pro-audio speakers in the studio compared with the relatively higher quality of many domestic speakers in the home. Interestingly he also considers integrated digital speaker systems to be the future both in studio and domestic environments.
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This is a very interesting interview with John Dunlavy about his speaker designs. He was working on using DSP to synchronize drivers and flatten the frequency response. Maybe the most interesting things is that he first measures, then listens.
Loudspeaker designer John Dunlavy: By the Numbers… | Stereophile.com
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Wow. That Stereophile interview is now more than a quarter of a century old. John Atkinson is unfailingly polite with the grand old man of speaker design but his astonishment that it is all driven by the physics before Dunlavy even bothers with listening shines through. History really does repeat itself as farce with some of the exclusively subjectivist drivel we must now all endure now that state of the art speaker design is in the digital domain.
John Atkinson: One of the things I found surprising was to learn that Kansas-born John does a good deal of the basic design work for a loudspeaker without ever listening to music on it. This would seem to be high-end heresy!
John Dunlavy: Oh, no. Listening comes later. Because if you stop to think about it, no loudspeaker can sound more accurate than it measures. It may sound worse, or it may sound sweeter, prettier, but if we’re talking about absolute accuracy—the ability of the speaker to reproduce as perfectly as possible whatever’s fed to it—such a system can never sound more accurate than it first measures. So we try to get the greatest accuracy we can achieve from measurements. Then we begin doing what some people might call “voicing,” because the best set of measurements are still open to interpretation.
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I read, usually without responding, some of the interventions here.
Here is my situation: I have bought year after year more and more expensive equipment. Not for the pleasure of spending my money, not for the pleasure of putting bigger and bigger equipment in my house. But only for the reason of obtaining, at home, the most faithful reproduction possible.
My installation and the professional treatment of my listening room cost about 200.000 euros (± $ 230.000)
I live alone, I don’t invite anyone to listen to my set-up, I don’t expose it for vanity, I almost never talk about it except to two friends who reason like me about the quality of the equipment and the quality of the music. We mainly listen to classical music and go to concerts.
So in which category are you going to classify me: show-off, unconscious false audiophile, sick?
So you can understand why I rarely get involved in discussions about money, audiophilia, idiotphilia, the rightness of the price or the weight of the equipment, the thickness of the cables.
I listen to music at home that sounds as close as possible to the concert or the signal recorded by the sound engineer, that’s what I’m looking for. I don’t discuss it anymore on the forums.
Very interesting!
Would you care to give us percentages as to how you split your investments across the system?
Genuinely interested here!
EDIT:
Just looked at your post in “showing off…”
I think I made it clear in my answer above that I’m not talking about money or price, let alone percentage (?!). I buy what I need where I need it in my set-up. Now it’s up to the task (to my ears). Buying cheap (which I had to do for a long time) is always an excessive expense: it is not very good and you have to spend again to find and hear better. For those who are lucky enough: buy the best you can hear, even if it is expensive.
And don’t justify yourself on the forums. It’s like your own solitary pleasure. Keep it to yourself. 
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No need to get all ruffled up!
You did disclose the amount of your investment, after all, so why not answer as to how it’s been split between components?
What are you giving up by doing that?
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personal observation: Listen Habits?
I use Dirac Live in my living room, and I love it with all these new Tidal recordings, but… when I listen to modern recordings of my old records, I miss the sound I am used to for 40 years or more and switch - sometimes - Dirac off
While I may think that 200,000 € is a tad excessive, I would certainly not consider this “sick.” People generally tend to spend as much as they are able to on their passions, whether it be cars, travelling, or fashion items.
Are you doing it to show off? I have no reason to call into doubt your assertion that this isn’t the case. But we also know that some people spend large amounts of money on things for the express purpose of acquiring bragging rights.
Judging from the photo of your set-up you have shared on a different thread (as another poster has pointed out), I believe that you do have the perfection of sound as your main objective. Too many photos of these kinds of set-up show poor speaker placement, no adequate room treatment, etc. That is obviously not the case with your set-up.
You say that you listen to classical music. As that is right up my alley, I have a question. With my system, which costs roughly a quarter of yours, I do manage to make myself believe that a singer for instance, or a string quartet, is right with me in my listening room. I find it much more difficult to create that illusion with large orchestras. So my question is: do you feel that having spent such a considerable sum on your equipment that an orchestra comes to invite itself chez vous?
On a side note, I feel that it’s easier to judge the quality of a system with purely acoustic music (classical music or jazz) – so no mikes or amplifiers involved at a live concert. When you go to recital by Bartoli or Kaufmann for instance, you get to hear their voice in the flesh, so to speak. And that you can then compare to what you get through a recording and evaluate how close your system is to the real thing.
Yes, the orchestra is invited to my house.
I never asked myself the question of repartition. As I said, I bought what I needed when I needed it. I didn’t calculate (I hesitated sometimes because of the price, but I didn’t calculate)
EDIT : If you look at the main brand I chose (THRAX), the preamp, the amp and the speakers cost about the same
Fair enough, but the question was not how and why you arrived at the split, but what the split is…
Read my EDIT