"The room can totally wreck, or make, a system"

@grannyring  Looking forward to you hearing my room soon.

I have not posted a sweep of the totally untreated room, just the partially treated room (first reflections at sides and on the ceiling slopes)[orange line]. Regardless, having a room almost perfect wrt the Fibonacci preferred ratio (10x17x23) it still needed some serious bass trapping. Just a taste of what treatments can do to improve the room response.

https://www.audiogon.com/systems/10635#&gid=1&pid=9 

Today I have all 4 corners heavily trapped. The rear corner traps hide behind the Real Traps Near Diffusors (half diffusor/half trap). Those hidden traps are solid triangles of OC703 (your friend!) stacked behind the Real Traps units.

Good advice abounds here. Too much absorption gives you a dead and boring room. Some of us who built HT's found out they suck for 2 channel!

Equalization and room correction software can only change what a speaker puts into the room, they can't do anything for what the room puts out in reflections and  reverberation.

Acoustical treatments are easy to do, and easy to overdo. I agree that an untreated room can never be right. Home theaters are different beasts than 2-Channel listening rooms, but to a point they can effectively share treatments. Case in point is Acoustimac's Home Theater Room Package I for $848 you get 6 2X4 2" panels covered in your choice of fabric,or upcharge for artwork plus 4 48X24 4" bass traps, likewise covered. Add to that a couple diffusers and the improvement in most listening rooms up to 200 or so sq ft is dramatic.

Because of the room layout, I couldn't use an off the shelf package In our living room, so I had them make up 16 - 2X2 2" panels in ceiling white - they are practically invisible, but made a very bright room usable, if not great (lots of glass, no drapes)

In our theater, I went with a darker grey (light control - it's a theater)  ceiling panels and using a combination of white 12X48 and black 12X36 2" panels I made a 5ft wide 'keyboard' wall hanging that my gets lots of positive comments, and is very effective. I used 2X4 construction offcuts to make a 16X48 diffuser  using the BBC staggering for the lengths (Warning- it weighs a ton!) for the back wall.  

All in, I spent under $2K plus about $500 in hired labor to install the ceiling panels. I am very pleased with the acoustical result and the SAF is very high. Money very well spent.

No room can make a system but can definitely break it.

As some others stated, let's not exaggerate the issue, as important as it is.

There is no substitute for great equipment.

And, yes, you can do a lot with rugs, books, furniture. It won't be ideal, but it should also be a living space for most of us, even if it is a dedicated listening room.

I've spent the bulk of my audiodefiled past attempting to counter spaces that defied reasonable attempts to 'cure issues' with varied results.  Since most were rented, anything beyond the 'not all that simple' quick tricks (toe in/out, space between/from back wall, height, tilt, etc.) would yield varied degrees of satisfaction or just relative tolerance of the situation.

In the 2 'owned' spaces, what imho and ears did the better outcome was room eq to the best attainable of FLAT, tweaked to taste.

Back in the '80's, an Audio Control eq with it's dinky calibrated mic and much darting around with the latter managed to get a handle on the response.

Later, my 1st Behringer eq which came with DRC and 100 memories with its' mic made the process less of a hurdle; L, R. and L+R allowed one to tame the tones and blend a mem setting or blur a pair together...improved but still a tad short in a world of random room profiles ... *laugh* ....

I now own 2 of them, and a 2nd matching mic is pending shortly....

That, REW, tone generators, sndpeek, and a raft of other online apps and display types allows analysis side by sides....but currently in yet again...not mine....ours.

Room Rodeo Response : Ignore the room, concentrate on the field within....
...and don't go all Dolby over it.... ;)

Rest of the time I just enjoy wherever the current plateau I'm at...

But, given the situation to do such, I'd still restart with the space first, knowing what i've read here and thereabouts..

Thanks, y'all. 👍

@mashif

Sure, live music occurs in an acoustic space and that’s an important part of the original sound. But a good recording captures that sound and that’s what I want to hear. An untreated, live room distorts the sound in the recording by adding sound that wasn’t part of the original performance. No different than noise.

A room needs both diffusion and absorption for different reasons. But the net effect of good treatment is reducing the sound of the room and allowing you to hear the recording without added noise, which is what reflections are. Noise that wasn’t contained in the original recording.

You’ve made a great case for a pair of headphones or near-field listening.

Your argument doesn't seem to extend to studio recordings, does it?  If I'm listening to Aja by Steely Dan, which is mixed to the nth degree, what kind of "room acoustics" are in there? Or EDM? It is up to my gear and my room to provide a canvas for that sound. The canvas can be good (well treated room) or bad.

For some reason, when I’ve treated my room and gotten the frequency curve and reflections where I want them, the music sound full, well placed in the sound stage, and relaxed. When I sit near-field or put on headphones, I feel suffocated.

No, there’s a difference between a good sounding, properly treated room that is not just about "adding noise." It is adding naturalness, the physiologically-based experience which was described before. If this was not true, most people on this forum would just be wearing headphones or would have formed a hobby around collectively bad taste.