Best room treatment

Hey Tim , 

    First let me thank you and everyone else again for all of your time you have spent helping me learn about this amazing hobby I’m loving more every day. I am going to play with what I have coming for a bit and go from there. I hope to be able to move to a swarm system sooner than later. I am confused about getting the bass sounding right without any room treatments. There is a fair amount of reverberation in the room. Does sub crawl and REW work regardless of the reverb and any other room issues? 

Hi OP:

I strongly suggest you treat your room first. It alters everything, and in a good way.  What choices and effort you put into your system without it may be moot, or wrong after.

So, any subwoofer solution will only alter frequencies below about 80 Hz. 

The average wall panel / diffusor however works in the mid to treble.

You want to limit early reflections, eliminate coherent reflections (i.e. echoes) and you want the decay of the sound in the room to be smooth and quick across all the audio bands.

In addition to lack of clarity, the extra time it takes for a signal to decay in a room alters the tonal balance, much like a tone control.  It's quite common in a modest living room for treatments to reduce the mid-treble energy, which also means the bass comes up.

A common report is "Wow my speakers sound so much bigger"

This may not be all you need, bass traps, EQ, or swarming, but I strongly encourage you to take the mid-treble room treatment seriously, and begin there.

Best,

E

Hello ronboco,

      I agree with everything erik_squires advised in his most recent post on this thread with the exception of totally treating your room first.  He is a very knowledgeable audio enthusiast, however, he importantly lacks any  personal experience with the use of the 4-sub swarm DBA concept. 
      He is absolutely correct in recommending room treatments for improved midrange, treble and stereo imaging performance but does not realize that bass room treatments are not necessary for optimum 4-sub DBA performance.  The advice I offered to you on my last post, which was based on my personal 4-sub DBA knowledge and experience, was given with the understanding that bass room treatments may be beneficial in improving your system and room's midrange, treble and stereo imaging performance but that they're definitely not required to improve your system and room's bass performance. 
      My advice plan for your room is to get the bass sounding right first and then to optimize the midrange, treble and stereo imaging performance at your designated listening seat, which will definitely benefit from the deployment of strategically positioned room treatment panels for the absorption and diffusion of midrange and treble frequency sound waves and may even benefit from the deployment of strategically positioned room treatment panels and traps for the absorption of bass frequency sound waves.  
     My main reasoning is that all room treatments should be determined and deployed as a final step, after your subs, seating and main speakers have been optimally positioned in your room.  I believe delaying all room treatments to this latter stage enables any professional room analysis to be more accurate and it'll allow you to more easily determine the effectiveness of any room treatments deployed.
     I realize now that I should've included these details in my last post but, at that time, I thought this topic could be explained and discussed a bit later on. 

Later,
Tim
  

Do all of the above and then add plants, lots of bushy green trees and stuff that will make perfect diffusers and have high WAF.

Excellent ! 😃