Yep

True, it’s not something that just anyone can calibrate without help. But now there are apps that show you the frequency response of your room and you can adjust the levels to flatten it. Also my criticism is mostly directed towards that very prevalent idea that an eq introduces distortion in the signal path and that any amount of distortion will destroy your enjoyment of the music. 1) if it’s a good EQ that is working properly, the amount of distortion is so vanishingly small that you would never be able to detect it 2) the problems presented by a listening room can be much, much worse than an a fragment of a percent of THD and that’s what the EQ is for.

It won’t affect it at all

Also, some people will say that an ew has no place in a hifi chain. Those people are stupid.

Yes that’s called an integrated amplifier. Keep them all. The EQ might come in handy and if you ever sell them the whole package will probably go for more. It’s a very nice set.

Are those Polk monitor 7s? What are the others?

Depends on the speaker. Mostly off but a lot of great speakers from the 70s are butt-ugly and others have tacky costing that is impossible to clean. Not to mention the fact that soft cones and domes AR poke magnets

I like Tidal but admittedly haven’t tried Qobuz. The DAC you use is also important, and if you use Bluetooth the codec is probably as important as everything else. LDAC was the best the last time I checked