I would say its the precise inverse: very few people can do it well by ear, and it takes a lot of practise and experimentation. At the most basic, try matching the volume level of a subwoofer to the main speakers - even this is already very hard to do by ear, for reasons of human auditory perception and psychoacoustics.

You don't even need a lot of "lab equipment dollars", measuring the basics can be done with ~100€ calibrated USB mic. As a rule of thumb, you cannot develop a good speaker without measuring, unless you have advanced modelling tools and experience to use them correctly, in which case the measurements will mostly match the simulations.

The best acoustic devices in the world have been made and tuned by hand for thousands of years. "you cannot develop a good speaker without measuring, [modelling, or simulations]." Is fundamentally untrue despite what the cybernetic totalists may want to believe.

>The best acoustic devices in the world have been made and tuned by hand for thousands of years.

Says who? You should really acquaint yourself with current research, starting with Toole's infamous "Sound Reproduction: The Acoustics and Psychoacoustics of Loudspeakers and Rooms".

> Says who?

Anyone who has read about or experienced instruments and music halls that were made before the commodification of electricity?

That book sincerely answers that sort of confusion. Audio production (here music creation) is very different from audio reproduction. There is no real way of judging the former, except for room acoustic which has been scientifically guided for a long time.

Yeah but there's a pretty important caveat here. The person who's actually doing the listening is the only person's opinion who matters about the quality. This is very much of a case of "if it sounds good it is good" That's why you're doing here because that is literally the only person who needs to be satisfied with this arrangement.

Thats valid.

My point was more along the lines of „a layman reading this might draw the conclusion that this is the proper way to solve this problem, because the text is written with an engineering mindset and demonstrates a certain degree of sophistication“, and I wanted to caution people that this is not the case.