Best room treatment

From my own experience, I started out with GIK. Some of their recommendations were spot on, like bass traps in each corner but I opted for the limiter versions (doesn't absorb anything over 500 hz) which I don't regret at all. However their recommendation for strictly  absorbing panels on first reflection points did not work for me. Overall IMO they oversell absorbing over diffusing for a listening room. After adding many diffusers I finally found the perfect balance to my ears between a dead room and a live one. Trial and error will be inevitable no matter who recommends what for you. Check out my system to get a better idea of what worked for me. I ended up with 72 sq ft of absorbing panels and 84 sq ft of diffuser plus the floor to ceiling bass traps in all 4 corners. Have fun figuring it out. The journey is totally worth it. 

Bottom line I ended up with different brands, and they all work together just as well as a single brand. And that way you get more and maybe better options.

@soix wrote:   

"I highly recommend reading “Premium Home Theater” by Earl Geddes that I believe is now only available through download.  By far the most approachable and helpful thing I’ve read on creating a good-sounding room.  I’d go so far as to say delay making any room treatment purchases until you’ve read what Earl has to say.  Best of luck. "   

Outstanding advice.  

Here's the link, the whole book can be download for free. Some of the video system information is outdated but virtually everything else is STILL well ahead of the curve: 

http://www.gedlee.com/Books/HomeTheater.aspx  

Duke 

Again many thanks for all of your excellent advice. I definitely need some more knowledge before taking out my wallet. 

I will also add an encouragement to read and absorb the excellent book by Earl Geddes.  I had already spent a good bit of time and effort attempting to self educate on room acoustics and psychoacoustic principles before finding the Geddes work.  As I recall, the book resulted in several "Aha" moments.  It is good enough that I have reread much of it several times. 

For those of us who are not in the business and have no formal training in room acoustics, we are trying to achieve enough understanding of the relevant principles to successfully reduce those principles to practice in a single application--our own listening room.   Most of us have jobs and families and have limited free time.   It can be hard to justify spending that precious free time self educating on acoustics rather than listening to music.  There is a reason why I remained clueless on room acoustics until I retired and had an abundance of free time.  There is also a reason why people like Jim Smith can make a living out of helping folks set up their rooms optimally.  There is a reason why a lot of serious audiophiles will just turn the decision making process over to GIK or RealTraps.  

The maxim, "knowledge is power" applies here. In my case, I can tell you that the efforts I have put into understanding small room acoustics has made me a better listener.  It has transformed that frustrating "something is not quite right here, and I don't know exactly what it is wrong much less how to rectify it, so I will spend $5000 on a new preamp and hope that fixes it" feeling to "this deviates from a live performance with respect to XYZ, and I should change ABC to rectify that change."   Five years ago I had a room full of really good equipment that sounded like crapola.  Now that same equipment sounds as good or very nearly as good as set ups I've heard that cost as much as 4x the cost of my system. 

5 years ago almarg offered the following comment on my systems page.

Speaking of the back wall, though, meaning the wall behind the listening position, a point which might eventually prove to be significant is that reflections from that wall will tend to produce a dip in frequency response at frequencies (in Hertz) in the vicinity of about 281.5 divided by the number of feet between that wall and the listener's ears. So if that distance is around 3 feet, as appears to be the case, reflections from that wall will cause a suckout, to some degree, in the vicinity of 94 Hz or so.

The 281.5 figure, btw, corresponds to 1/4 of the speed of sound in typical indoor environments, in feet/second. Rear wall reflections at a frequency of about 281.5 divided by the distance to that wall in feet will arrive at the listener's ears exactly out of phase with the direct sound arrival. The resulting suckout can be quite pronounced IME. 

In two paragraphs, Al completely changed the trajectory of my audiophile experience by  applying his knowledge to my particular application.   His guidance wasn't opinion or personal preference, it was science based fact.   Happy listening!