Hardwood floors vs Carpet

guys. guys! listen to yourselves...

uncarpeted wood floors sound very bright and alive but ultimately fatiguing to me. oriental carpets are an integral part of my system. but be careful; enjoying fine carpets is a hobby unto itself. and get good carpet pads, i prefer the fibrous horsehair over rubber.

Most orchestras play on hardwood floors......

Moved to new house. Hardwoods and 20 foot ceiling in listening room. My system sounds so bright and congested now I want to move back.
Dave

With parallel hard wood floor and ceiling - added to parallel hard walls, flutter echo is very likely, which will tend to add a "shoutiness" to voices and just plain sound bright overall. You can fix it with rugs, but there are other ways to attack the problem.

One of my systems is in a room with a tiled floor and I use a thick Persian rug covering most of the area between me and the speakers. In this room it is still not really possible to sit more than about 12 feet from the system without the room's reverberent sound dominating. Some speakers sound horrible in the room regardless of how you set them up.

In the end I realised that speakers like Thiels, with wide dispersion were a "no-no" in this room. On the flip-side, speakers that beamed - like Martin-Logans, all other panel speakers and even some British monitor speakers like Spendor - had utterly no problems in the room at all. So, rather than spending megabucks on Persian rugs, you can spend megabucks on some speakers (more fun) that do not have wide dispersion.