How do you know what room treatments to use?


I am thinking improving my system with room treatment. My system sounds “loud” (distorted?) when turned up. It is a high resolution, very good $100K system built over several decades.  I am getting a new preamp that will improve things but think that the room is significantly to blame. How can I actually tell what is amiss and what is needed?
mglik
I started with GIK full range absorbers at my first reflection points and that helped tremendously.  I then added quadratic diffusers to my rear wall and to my left and right.  I temporarily have some diffusers in my mid wall corners for the bass until I get more absorbers. I also want absorbers for my front wall and front corners. My virtual system has pictures of the room. 
Someone not knowing that about acoustic dont know really his own audio system ....

i know mine.....


My point exactly. Unfortunately involves a lot of hard work. Much easier to buy something, push a button, pay for a readout, trust authority (who really these days can still trust authority???!?!? and yet they do!). Not realizing that as hard as it is to understand room acoustics its even more work to understand microphones and measurements.

There was a whole long thread recently where the difficulty and complexity of measuring something as seemingly simple as output level is way harder than anyone thinks. Yet they turn around and think they can push a button and a readout will tell them how to treat their whole room.

Oh well. At least a few of us get it.
People think that having ears is enough.... But we must learn how to use the ears and listen...

And we listen with the brain’s Intrinsic Fourier analyser.... It is way more important to learn how to use this internal computer than an external one...

For that we must put ourself in a dynamic situation where listening to all that is coming is like decoding the tracks of preys... And any audio system is embed and hidden, like a prey embed and hidden in the forest, in an invisible electrical forest of noise, of vibrations, and a forest of audible waves....

Most people dont go for the prey they prefer to buy a piece of costly meat killed ( read designed and ready made) for their easy consumerism... No need to track anything and no need to learn to listen....

They call the forest a city and decree that they are no unwanted noise there, no unwanted vibrations, and no need to prepare anything, because what they buy is ready to use out of the box in their house.....

There is no forest and there is no prey....There is no journey either....

:)


Reading my own post i realize that i am sometimes border delirious.... :)

But i am happy today with my last attempt at electrical embeddings controls...

I apologize for too much uncontrolled enthusiasm.....

Perhaps it will be better to embed our enthusiasm in numbers.... :)