Natural room reflections never exceed direct sound, so precedence always holds

Evidence

What can also be seen is that in normal rooms where naturally reflected sounds cannot exceed the level of the direct sound, 0 dB, there are no possible early reflections that would cause the precedence effect to break down. Obviously, such disruptive sounds can occur in multichannel audio recordings—sometimes deliberately. — Toole, Floyd E, Sound reproduction- the acoustics and…, 617

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to audio mixing and reproduction—links to why multichannel panning can break the precedence effect that natural acoustics never would.