Is a 12' X 16' room big enough for stereo?

Get a set of Argent room lenses. They cure EVERYTHING wrong with a small room and make it sound about four time bigger than it is.

Francis,
I'm jealous of your new "large" listening room. I'm in a 11 x 12 x 8 bedroom with B&W Matrix 803s! Elgordo, where can I find out about the Argent room lenses . . . and would they help in my tiny listening room? Good luck with the new house. Read the thread about dedicated circuits and get your electrician to install at least one into your new listening room with good cable.

Joel

my 12' X 18' room has worked great. i have a bay window and an 11' stepped ceiling that have really helped. you will need to treat the walls for reflections. i spent 2 years experimenting with different levels of wall treatment before i got it right. getting the right balance between live and damped is important.

consider floor to ceiling shelving behind your seating position for cds and lps. they work great as a diffuser and reduce shelf clutter. you don't want to lose any width from 12'.

your biggest challenge will be smoothing the bass and avoiding a mid-bass bloat. consider raising the height of your speakers to decouple your woofers from the floor boundary.

the biggest advantage of a relatively small room is that you can control what is happenning better than in a large room. good luck!

Your biggest problem may not be how small it is but the relationship between the dimensions. If it is 8ft high then you have 8X12X16 which could be terrible at certain frequencies. They are all evenly divisible by 4 and two are evenly divisible by 8. This will reinforce certain frequencies. You may need some type of tube traps.
I once had a friend living in an old Victorian apt. with a room 12X12X12. WOW, did he have problems!
Richard

The last post is right on the money. The key will be the ceiling height. I had a room built in my basement, which has 8 foot ceilings. Though I could have gone much bigger in lenght and widt, I ended up with 14 ft by 12.75 feet after crunching some numbers base don the formulae in The Master Handbook of Acoustics and using the room mode software posted on the Stereophile Web Site. I use SF Guarneri Homage speakers w/ a REL subwoofer and get reasonable flat response down to 20 Hz (measured w/ Rat Shack SPL meter and a test CD), other than a (not unpleasant) bump of about 5 db at 40 Hz or so. After trying many different arrangements, I settled on a nearfield arragnement with the speakers 8 feet apart, 3 feet from the side and over 4 ft from the back wall. I sit about a foot away from the front wall w/ RPG diffusers behind my head. All the first order reflection points are treated w/ RPG foam. This works VERY well!! Net, it's more important to get the room ratios "right" and use sound treatment than to buil a larger room w/ lots of nodal problems.