[erdewit]

> because a phase-neutral response created in a room is only valid in one point of the room

Author here. The term "phase-neutral" simply means here that the impulse response is symmetrical and doesn't add a phase shift. It doesn't even try to neutralize the phase characteristics of the room, which is what you may be thinking. In fact the phase information from the measurement is completely discarded. Furthermore, the frequency response is averaged to get a more general and robust (less over-fitted) correction that works pretty well across the room. Try it...

[patrakov]

Well, if you discard the phase of the original response anyway, then you can shave a few milliseconds of latency by switching to minimum-phase (which is causal, not symmetric) instead of linear-phase. The math is in scipy.signal.minimum_phase.