Carpet or hardwood floor?

It's not so easy. Carpet covers a large area with a lot of Sabiens--this can be very good in an other wise live or bright room, it can be bad in room that's already over damped. In general, I like hardwood floors with area rugs. This provides maximum flexibility, and I like speakers on the floor (mainly for 2 channel listening--things are different for HT and multi-channel), with short reflection times bouncing off the floor, but make sure there is ample absorption near the listener. These short reverberation times add to spaciousness and imaging, but this can be totally irrelevant if the rest of the room is right.

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Hardwood floors if you have tapestry's or large curtains everywhere. Otherwise, rugs with drywall or panelling is fine.

I'd recommend a carpet. If it makes your room too dead, remove something else and keep the carpet. Floor bounce is generally problem #1 in speaker-room interaction. Minimizing it is never a bad thing.

I have found carpet to give better acoustics, but I don't particularly like carpet (for many reasons, amongsts which we have pets), so a good trade off may be rugs.

I love hardwood floors but unfortunately carpet sounds a lot better. I've tried rugs but a fully carpeted room just sounds better in my opinion. You get significantly more floor refections with a rug and hardwood floors.