Best room treatment

Ronboco,  I don't think your room is hopeless at all, but it is a different sort of puzzle than most of us have. Your room is so atypical that most of us will be hard put to offer any certain guidance about how to proceed with traditional room treatments in the absence of measurement.   I would view your high ceilings as an asset with respect to room modes.   Having two large openings in addition to having the high ceilings may make it a challenge to properly pressurize the room.  But your room dimensions should give a relatively low Schroeder Frequency, which is that frequency below which room modes predominate, This is very good.  It could mean that you will require much less bass trapping than most of us, or said in a different way, you may receive relatively modest benefit from an investment in bass traps and other treatments.  REW will help you discern what your room is really doing.  In addition to REW, if you are able to connect your computer to your audio system, you can play pure test tones (do a google search) while walking around the room with an SPL meter and find the locations where bass frequencies are being reinforced by in phase reflections and partially cancelled by out of phase reflections.   You will be able to discern which of your room surfaces are responsible for particular room modes by noticing if the SPL levels vary while raising or lowering the meter, moving it side to side, and to an extent by moving the meter forward and backwards in the room (mindful the SPL will drop or increase as the meter moves further away from or closer to the meter).  This technique could be used along with the crawl technique mentioned earlier to optimize placement of your subs.

I am about 99.9% sure that you would benefit far more by putting 3K into a distributed bass array than putting 3K into bass traps.  If I were you, I would move in that direction. But if I were you I'd ask Duke LeJeune the question directly.

Since you already have two REL subs, you should be able to offset some of the cost of a DBA like the Swarm by selling them.   If I were to offer advice in the absence of measurement data, that would be my advice. 

With your high ceilings, you are not going to be dealing with issues like floor to ceiling slap echo and the room openings will also partially mitigate the side wall to side wall slap echo type problems.  You may find yourself in an enviable position where you don't need much traditional room treatment.  Time will tell.

Most of us don't want a bunch of bass traps etc in our living rooms if we can help it. 

brownsfan, thanks for the input on my room. It sounds like I should implement REW before I consider any room treatments. Were you suggesting I sell the RELs as a cost effective move or would they not work as well as a dedicated swarm set up would.  I was looking forward to how they would sound in our room. If the RELs would work as well and I like how they sound I may just try to save for two more. 

Ronboco,  

My professional background was in chemical process research and development.  I learned that it was utterly futile to begin experimental work until I had a reliable analytical technique that would inform me of the result of the experiment.  With respect to audio, we all use our ears, and our ears should always remain the final arbiter.  The problem with listening is that we all suffer from fatigue, at which point we are not listening critically.  We also tend to focus on a single variable rather than making a broad based assessment when trying to optimize by ear.  On the other hand,  I can work on my room for hours at a time using REW to assess the impact of a given change on overall frequency response, ringing, the balance of direct to reflected sound, early reflection mitigation, etc.  I can go back a month later and look at the data and draw the same conclusions, or even discern something I missed the first time.  So yes, measure first, attempt to fix a given problem optimizing existing gear second, and spend money third.   However, be aware that there is a waiting period once you place an order for a Swarm,  so if you are sure you are going to go that way, the sooner you order the better. 

To be clear,  I would make sure I had the two RELs you have optimally placed before I do anything.  If that gets you where you want to be, it costs you nothing.  Problem solved at no cost.

Most of the time and in most rooms, it takes 4 subs to get the low frequencies where you would like.   I suspect you will find that your room is not be an exception to that general rule.  I think you would have a more cost effective and possibly better solution going with the Audiokinesis Swarm or the similar Debra than buying two more REL subs.  Those things ain't cheap.  If you get an AK Swarm, you won't need the existing RELs, so you might as well sell them and use the proceeds on offsetting the cost of the Swarm. 

The Swarm system will go to a lower frequency than almost all of the REL subs will.    I have nothing against REL subs, and use one in my living room system.  But the distributed array approach is just so much better fundamentally that it is the way to go if you are looking to achieve the best results.   

Again, before I spent any money, I'd send Duke my room dimensions and see what he thinks.  He's seen the Swarm installed in a lot of different rooms, I'm sure.  I have zero actual experience with a room like yours.  

Brownsfan. Is the REW system the same as Dirac, Audyssey etc.? The Marantz 8805 I’m getting comes with the latest version of Audyssey so would it be just as effective as REW? Does Duke have a company or would I just google him? Trying to sneak chatting and searching in while my CNC is running. Thanks 

How embarrassing. Duke is audiokinesis. One other thing I was wondering about Is do you need to consider what  type of speakers you have to match up well with the swarm system?