Does the first reflection point actually matter??

Hi Erik,

So I have also had problems believing in the first reflection point.  Whatever I tried seemed to make no difference at all. I've tried many times in many different ways but mostly using thick fabric panels.

For years I've always had a nice thick rug in front of the speakers and a diffuser panel on the wall behind the speakers with a panel on either side.
The speakers were usually along the long wall of my rooms...as they were also part of the entertainment system (TV).

In my last house (the one before my current house), the chosen room would not support the diffuser panel because there was a pony wall (low wall) behind it and I decided to use the rug elsewhere instead.  The left speaker (Salk Songtower) was 10" from the pony wall and about 20" from the left wall.  The right speaker was also 10" from the back wall but there was no right wall.  The right wall didn't start until about 9' into the space.

Clearly not an ideal setup...but for the first time I had a dedicated room for the audio with the speakers on the short wall of a bigger room.

Sound was OK...not great...but sounded good enough for me.

My girlfriend at the time suggest I move the stack of records (3 stacks high) from the right wall (near the middle of the space) to the left wall nearer the audio rack.  Only problem was that it was very close to the left speaker (way too near the speaker to be a first reflection point) but I decided it made sense form a practical POV.  

That one change fueled my obsession with the room acoustics. Even though the right speaker had no wall the stacks of vinyl refocused the sound on the left speaker to a point that everything was more coherent...locked in.  It's as if the sound had more clarity, focus and precision.  BIG, HUGE improvement in creating a 'reality' to the music if that makes sense. 

Over the next 6 months the tweaks resulted in the 180 degree change to the other short wall, nothing between the speakers but a rug and the audio rack along the right wall. I finally understood what imaging/soundstage was about.

You've got to try everything...every position sounds different.  I tried so many things but now have a sense of how a rooms work acoustically. 
That experience has helped me set up my current home.  But it will never be like that room.  That room was perfect.  BTW, it also had an acoustic ceiling...not the soft kind.  It was the early concrete acoustic ceiling which has no asbestos.  Acoustic ceilings get a bad rap.  They're the best thing going.

The first reflection point results from a basic flaw in most speaker designs: flat baffles with front firing speakers. The real solution to your problem are omnidirectional speakers which much more closely emulate the natural propagation of sound and obviously obviate the whole topic.

@erik_squires 

So the other area which to me is more important is the floor between and behind the speakers.   It seems that treble harshness always lives there.

Definitely not first reflection points.

Can it be that the floor is closer to your tweeter than your sidewalls?
(I hope your ceiling is also further away from your tweeter than your floor) 😉

That may be the reason why you got that conclusion/s..

(The first reflection points are lik said on all the different types of room boundaries. The character and why it is called the "first" is it the "first" time the direct sound bouncing against a boundary. That means that each time a bounce is occurring some energy is lost into that boundary it reflects on. So the first reflection is the strongest one or let say it has the most energy left in it. If we look at if you play against the long wall and only look at the side wall reflections then the sidewall reflections is so far away and the sound need to travel so far that it will loose energy just because of that and as we also know is if the reflected sound is arriving to the listening position more than 5ms delayed than the ear brain can distinguish between what is reflected and what is the direct sound but if the side walls were closer/less than < 5ms than our brains can not separate what is direct or reflected sound.
As we see the replies in this thread is mixed because our experiences is with different distances to the side walls and nobody is specifying what distance to the side walls they have when they tell us their experience..)

My speakers sound just fine, at least to me in my room. No acoustic treatments whatsoever. The room is furnished with a mix or balance of reflective and absorbing materials. I just turn the system on and enjoy my music. I'm not fussing over this stuff, as it makes the hobby unenjoyable to me. Besides, all these things stuck up on the wall are ugly. I'd rather accomplish basically the same thing with a balanced room via its contents or furnishings. Jmo

@gs5556 

Thank you for the circling tones test link.  Freaked me out...I could swear there was a speaker directly to my right and left.  Very cool holographic test.