Potential new room, will this work well?

Taking 8' (or so) away from the 40' will not have a big effect (if any) in a room that large...It may help, more than hurt.

Large rooms don't suffer acoustical problems to the same degree that small rooms do, unless they are to large....thats another can of worms though.

Dave

Thanks for the input, I know I can read many threads on this and actually wish far more would read instead of asking the same basic questions over and over and over.
I just wanted to get a quick feel for opinions and thanks!

Dave,

I strongly beg to differ... My dimensions are ~33' x ~18' x ~9'. Big rooms definitely can have serious modal reinforcement issues. Chadnliz, I recommend you do some research about acoustics online at a forum such as this one:

http://forum.studiotips.com/index.php

And this one:

http://www.rivesaudio.com/resources/links/frame.html

And this one:

http://www.tonmeister.ca/main/textbook/index.html

Dave's advice may be comforting, but it is incorrect information concerning a room of the size you are planning wall distances that share common integer multiples. Your room is not big enough to be immune from these modal issues, especially when taking those 8' off the longest side. With shared room modes you are going to have very large bumps in your room's frequency response in certain places at the low frequencies where there is overlap. Find out for yourself on those links, or find out after the fact if you ever measure your in-room response as I have.

Here is one last link. It is a room mode calculator:

http://klipschcorner.com/Tools/ModeCalc.aspx

It will graph out your problem areas... Keep in mind though, it only does so to 200 Hz. For fun, plug in my room dimensions. You can see in my "System" where I have my low frequency room response graphs, that I have major reinforcement modes right where it predicts at 62.8 Hz. I don't have the higher modes at 125.6 because my room is irregular shaped in the back of the room and it is extremely well treated by an acoustical engineering company, so the smaller waves get broken up because of the shape change and bass traps.

Will some of these issues be tamed by the Vandersteen 11 band EQ tuning feature?

Jkalman

Sure, you can read all you want....still, I said 8' "or so"...With 40' to work with, I don't see a problem that can't be worked out....thats more than comforting, it's a fact.

Also, with a room that large, you will have the advantage of optimum speaker and listener placement within the space...even better.

All rooms need some amount of room treatment...maybe a touch of EQ'ing as a final sound tweak. Every room is different.

All the reading is fine, everyone should read up...and then, disregard about 50% of what you just read...it does not apply. Experience is the better teacher.

Dave