> Or they could buy equipment with active room conditioning like Dirac.

You realize that the pitch for this is basically the same as the pitch for magic pebbles? It's a cure-all box you put on the wire to make things sound better, for a low price of $1,500 or something like that.

I know enough about signal processing to know that magic pebbles probably work worse, but I can think of many reasons why it might not produce the audio you subjectively like better. I suspect it can't really even correct for many of the real-world issues you might have, because equalization doesn't fix echoes, resonance, etc.

In any case, it's a bit of a strawman, because most audiophiles are not buying pebbles in the first place. They're trying vacuum tubes instead of ICs, or are trying out different op-amps, or stuff like that.