Hardwood floors vs Carpet

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.

Hi Red,
I agree re dispersion issues and SIDEWALL reflections, but won't most forward-firing transducers have floor-bounce problems regardless of lateral tweeter "flare", etc?
To the thread-head: I would be VERY surprised if you don't hear a MAJOR spectral and temporal (smearing) change after you remove the rugs.
Adding a large area rug WITH a thick horsehair pad will undoubtedly help to recapture the response you enjoyed before.
Good Luck! Ern

Hi Ernie. My Martin Logans beam (as all panels do) in a way that there is no floor bounce of upper frequencies until you are a very long way from the speakers. It is definitely not just a lateral issue. For ML speaker the panel starts a foot or so above floor level and vertical dispersion is not much more than the vertical height of the panel for some distance. The difference in flutter echo in my "problem room" between a panel speaker and a speaker with a dome tweeter is very significant. Even so a rug is required, but with a panel speaker it needs to only be (in my room anyway) about 6ft by 8ft.

I agree with Subaruguru ... when we shifted from carpet to hardwoods, I was not happy with the increased brightness, and I thought the imaging suffered also. But, I don't have it set up exactly as before, so I thought maybe some of it was my imagination. Also, I found it more fatiguing after a while and my listening durations decreased. There is no way to fit permanent area rugs into the decor at the right locations. I keep foam panels under the sofas and pull out for "critical listening" sessions and place at floor reflection points - that seems to help. I'm sure I could do better with some more effort, or different speakers or electronics. Think we're moving soon and, although I love the look and easy maintenance of the hardwoods, my listening room WILL be carpeted again.