What's the size of your listening room and/or ht?

Right now my gear is squozed into a 14x14 room with 7' ceilings, but this is temporary as we've just moved in. The house is ~150 years old and obviously wasn't designed with audio or theatre in mind! I'm building an addition, but the biggest I could realistically fit in the budget is 15x20 inside dimensions with a 8' 8" ceiling height. (I live in the middle of nowhere, too, where the real estate prices are reasonable - how do you guys manage this in SF and DC???)

The dedicated room won instant WAF as the addition basically is my room downstairs and a new kitchen upstairs :)

The last house (back in the SF area) had "more" space. It was 16x23, but it was shared space with the living room.

In answer to Blw:

I live in SF, but have a great wife that "lets" me have the biggest room in the house for my hobby. She even had to move her office into the dining room when our child got old enough to need his own room.

Also, if I had your room I would definitely "change" the dimensions. Whatever frequency that has a 7' wave is reinforced 3X. Line the walls with bookcases to reduce the problem.
Good luck with your next room.

Richard

I am moving into a new home with dimensions of 32x19'8"x12'1". Not yet set up so I can't comment on the sound. I know I'll need some room treatments but a lot of the specs seem like they should work nicely. My old listening room was about 27x17x9 and sounded quite good - the measurements only showed a couple of minor peaks and I really enjoyed it. Room dimensions are only one piece of the picture. Surface treatments are critical and affect the overall depth and soundstage. Lots of opinions here -- from real hard/solid surfaces to more forgiving surfaces. The key is consistency in design and approach -- there's more than one way to skin a cat.

I mentioned in a recent thread that one of my favorite listening experiences was in an average room of about 13x11x8. The equipment was great and there was lots of cushy furniture and heavy curtains in the room which helped.

Generally good things are: Fewer windows, more carpets or rugs, plush furniture, heavy drapes, lots of uneven surfaces like bookcases and dimensions which are not direct multiples of one another (e.g., 10x12x14 -- multiples of 2, or 9x12x15 -- multiples of 3). Good luck. Take a look at Sound Sturdio Construction on a Budget by F. Alton Everest for background (simple stuff, no differential equations per Rives' much more scientific approach). P.S. Good luck Rives -- let us know how it turned out.

Ozfly--thanks. I really can't wait to post what we are doing. We are working in some really intersting areas--trying to reduce the square footage (although still realistically large), fit into the house appropriately (geometry wise that is), and make it sonically fantastic all at the same time. These are real world goals. It will be at least a month now before the modelling is complete--it is taking much longer than originally anticipated due to other customer commitments (they come first). Once the room is in it will be tunable to a large degree and it will be very interesting to see how close our models and the actual acoustic measurements are. There are many psycho acoustic responses we have modelled into this room, which is rarely done. As you can probably tell--I'm very excited about this project; we are covering some fairly new ground on a few areas. It will be over a year before it is complete, but I intend on detailing it appropriately on our website--so stay tuned.