The sonic effect of a reflective surface behind the speakers can be very speaker dependent — dipoles, omni’s, and open baffle designs ‘generally’ are less sensitive as their designs account for the reflected back wave. At shows, particularly a new venue, you don’t know what you’ll get for a room, or how it will sound. The Alsyvox set up very easily and we had very good sound, much better than I expected in a 300 sq ft hotel room. We had no bass issues. The curtains in the room actually allowed for a wee bit of tuning, I pushed the heavy drapes into the corners, and pulled the sheers partially across the window. That seemed to create a good balance.
The guy across the hall from us, was a bit of a jerk in that he left the door to his room wide open and played music very loudly. I can only surmise he was doing that to drain some base energy because, imho, he didn’t have very good sound.
For the most part, exhibitors do their best with what they get. Its expensive to exhibit and anticipate every scenario — tube traps are marginally effective and can bring their own problems, and their size makes them expensive to ship around only for some freight company jerk to put a fork blade through them. If an exhibitor knows his speakers require a lot for set up, then yes they should bring what might be needed.
But shows are just a place to get a taste, and see if a product or brand is palatable for you. Then you can drill down and explore further if those products are good for you and your system. I don’t recommend drawing many conclusions from a show. But, if you hear pretty great sound at a show, with crappy electrical, iffy rooms, etc. that can be a good sign. We had one electrical outlet, and just barely managed to plug everything in. I did remember to bring one long power cord for such an event, but as it turned out the one I grabbed had a C19 terminal and I needed to C15 for the Nordhost power strip. So from the wall to the power strip and the strip to the Taiko Extreme server just managed to connect.
On the other side of the room the socket was mid-room, I used that one to power the LPS for the network switch and router. And the rooms only had Wi-Fi, no ethernet. So exhibiting with the Taiko extreme server, I had to dump Wi-Fi to ethernet, then into a router, then build a small subnet so we could control the server with our iPhones. We used the DAC in an esoteric CD player, so we would at least have cd back up if the streaming didn’t work out.
I do not envy those exhibitors who brought tons and tons of gear. Is no small task to get everything delivered, unpacked, set up, and sounding good — only to tear it all down in a couple days in a hasty retreat.