Hipper
Addicted to Fun and Learning
Whether isolation is more important I'm not sure - depends on how bad the ambient noise is - but I certainly agree that dealing with in-room noise, whether coming from in the room or externally such as road traffic is important and not mentioned that often. It's worth investigating for sure. For example I added a third layer of glazing as I live on a busy High Street and it lowered the noise floor enough to seem almost quiet. It certainly made a difference to the detail I could hear in the music and I presume makes listening less fatiguing as your brain needs less effort to decipher what you want to hear.Room acoustics is less of an issue than isolation. High in-room noise floor is the killer of good sound. If you have some way of applying EQ, life is considerably easier. But there's only so much you can do about traffic, plumbing, washer/dryer/dishwasher/HVAC, nearby family arguments, without spending a lot of money rebuilding or renovating.
On room appearance, furniture etc. it of course depends on whether you are lucky enough to have a dedicated listening room or have to make compromises for domestic reasons.
I'm one of the lucky ones and have a dedicated room. This means it's set up only for good listening. I also listen in the semi darkness. The result is it doesn't matter what the room looks like. My only restrictions are the room size and shape etc. and my finance.
I first heard what could happen regardless of equipment, cables etc. when I started experimenting with positioning of speakers. To move people onto the road of room acoustics all it needs is for them to walk around their room whilst listening to some music. They will notice how it changes wherever they are in the room, particularly the bass. This illustrates that moving the speakers and listening chair can change the sound and if done well, can give better sound - lesson one! From there we should encourage the desire to find out what is going on by measuring, simply with test tones and SPL meter, or more sophisticatedly and accurately with software and microphone. After that an introduction to room acoustics (GIK or RealTraps website, or Floyd Toole's book) and we've got them hooked! DSP and EQ to follow to give them a box to play with and they should be in heaven (or hell if they can't stop fidgeting with the stuff )