SPEAKERS FOR MY NEW LISTENING ROOM

Buy acoustic treatments first, if you want to hear what's on the recording.

CARL, HOW DOES ONE DECIDE UPON ACOUSTIC TREATMENTS ? DO I NEED AN AUDIO SWEEP GENERATOR AND A SOUND PRESSURE LEVEL METER TO TEST VARIOUS PLACES IN MY ROOM FOR HOT SPOTS? ELDRAGON AND 3141510 , I WILL GIVE THESE SELECTIONS CAREFUL CONSIERATION ,THANK YOU . ANY ONE ELSE ?

All you need to do is damp first reflection points on every wall, and preferably use full round traps at least in the room's corners behind each speaker (16 inch or larger diameter). Do this, and you're done. You can tweak the imaging and response smoothness by turning the diffraction sides of the traps to either face toward the wall, or away from the wall (besides adjusting listening seat and speaker position). The only reason to use mics and analyzers is if you have a lot of different "critical" audio listeners coming through often to listen to your system. They would obviously want to know how well your system/room measures. You'd want to be able to show them on paper, so they wouldn't try to move stuff every time they came by to "improve the imaging/tonality".

FBI What I´ve done to measure different treatment effects without expending that much money is get the Radio S. SPL and a test tone CD like Chesky/Stereo Review Stereophile has some too. It´s very easy to get an idea of placement and problems using this and plotting in a Excel sheet. You don´t get a fancy frequence sweep but you get a closer look to what´s really happening, sometimes seasoned golden ears find out that what they´ve as the best sound in their rooms is plagued with enhanced frequencies.... Good luck

A good test CD is the Sheffield "My Disc", with the band limited pink noise tracks. Your ears will suffice, but you can use a radioshack SPL meter if you like. I have one.