How far can room treatments solve boomy bass?

Bass traps in the corners of the room can do quite a bit to even out bass response. Even when you go to a bigger room, tube traps will be a help. Treat at least one end of the room (traps in each corner) and preferrably all four.

To with the biggest traps you can get away with--there is no substitute for thickness/mass when it comes to bass trapping (the exception would be "active" bass traps which use a speaker that cancels bass). With the round bass traps, like the ASC tube traps, I like the 16" models.

While room treatments are very important, I think the system used is just as, if not more important, in determining the kind of sound you will hear. Every one I think would agree to try "bass traps" in the corners and to get the speakers off the floor. Also reduce bass reflection from the floor with some sound absorbing material like a rug.
Then invest your entire retirement money along with any other holdings in a brand new, top of the line, state of the art system, and you will be all set.

In the 3 listening room that I've measured, Hemholtz devices like the tube trap/bass trap can be reasonably effective down to a little below 100hz. In an untreated room, you'll often see a hump in the half octave above that point. I've been pretty successful in taming that with bass traps.

Below that point, I've always had to deal with +/- 10db lumpiness that seems to resist "passive" treatment. I ended up using DRC (Audyssey, et al) to clean this up. I don't know if every room works this way, but it's been pretty consistent in my homes.

Good Luck.

Marty

I tend to side with Zman here. The usual sorts of room treatments likely won't amount to much more for you than a band-aid type of fix at best. If it were me and not knowing your budget limitations, I might consider, until you can get a better room anyway, the short-term fix of breaking down and getting yourself some sort of equalizer...yes, I said EQ! Possible insertion losses aside (which I think are often over exaggerated, myself), they offer enormous flexibility in just this kind of situation - expect your bass problems to be solved and then some. Perhaps a nice Rane unit on the used market, or possibly a digital EQ if you only have a digital source - a Behringer DEQ-2496 can be used in a digital passthru mode and costs peanuts...very little signal degredation this way if you are using it between a transport and a DAC for example. There may be other possible candidates out there, you just may have to do some looking, or ask others here. Hope this helps.

I don't understand the concept that acoustic treatment for a "too small" room is not the answer. It's exactly (part of) the answer. The modal distribution in a small room is lumpy well up into the upper bass region. The larger the room, the lower the frequency where that lumpy response starts to even out.

If your speakers are so large that the drivers don't "integrate" within the listening space, then yeah, that's a problem, too, but a small room is the worst offender when it comes to acoustic response in the low frequencies. Fix those and things will definitely get better.