From what I've read, dead rooms are bad. Covering every wall in foam would not make for a good listening room, but usually some form of absorption is needed (usually first reflection points). Dispersion can be done via furniture or, dispersion panels in leu of an empty room. Bass absorption comes down to room size and speaker placement, and some rooms are worse than others.
Better is with a speaker that has been designed and set up to work with the room, and without all the absorbers.
I have only seen very few speakers doing this, and all does it very differently. To me, in small rooms, the problem areas is in the bass and in high treble, the excessive bass output needs to go down and the tweeter dispersion needs to go wide. Do you have some examples of good integration between a small room and a pair of speakers without any absorbers or other room treatments?
that i can not believe, near field listening has been around for ages i would think, just look at old pics of studios and this near field listening seems very commen. also, i would also guess that more people are used to very good desktop listening and headphones, and then when listen to speakers at a larger distance with lots of room contribution makes the sound quality goes down a lot. i think on and off-axis behavior is just as important regardless of listening distance