Does carpet deaden the sound too much?


I’ve always had my speakers on carpet, but alway feel my system could be a little more livelier. Is it the carpet that absorbs life out of the sound? 
mike

hiendmmoe

In my experience having my systems in 3 different rooms with different flooring throughout the years, the best sound comes from wood/tile floor with a thick rug in front of the speakers. A fully carpeted room sounds a bit dead but that can be resolved if diffusion is added to the ceiling and/or walls for balance. If the speakers are inherently bright then perhaps nothing is required to be done.

@g_nakamoto We were lent a pair of McIntosh MC501 with the matching pre for at least 12 months some years ago, while the development of a customer's pair of speakers was undertaken.
They sure had some drive, so yeah I'm thinking you're not going to lack energy in your room at all.

I have only got 400 Watts a side and I don't use even close to nearly all of it ever.

@hiendmmoe - have you any thoughts about the varying responses so far?

 

I had speakers spiked on w2w carpet for many years. I just had carpet removed and hardwood floors refinish. I am now using Herbies Gliders with spiked speakers on the hardwood floors. It sounds more lively, open and detailed. I think its a big improvement. I am happy with the result.

@OP, there is a lot of nonsense being sprouted here through misunderstanding. Absorption in a room is necessary to reduce the time it takes sound to decay but the absorption needs to work over as wide a bandwidth as possible.

If sound is left to decay in an untreated room the result is smeared sound, congestion and loss of detail and nuance.

A carpet is, because of its limited thickness, a narrow-band absorber, and if you have wall to wall carpet as I see you do, then you will be absorbing only a limited frequency range and because there is so much carpet there will be information lost, resulting in an imbalanced sound.

Successful treatment is achieved by broad-band absorption.

@artemus_5 mentions finding hard floor and a rug helped.

@fatdaddy2 described a simple experiment which is a good idea. The sheets of plywood will negate some of the damage of wall to wall carpet. I favour a broad-band absorber on the ceiling preferable to carpet as a means of dealing with floor to ceiling absorption. This makes more sense if you consider that the human ear has evolved to allow for floor reflections.