Room Treatments

I use a number of room treatment products including those from Real Traps and the defunct Eighth Nerve. I do agree they can provide improvements in sound if set up properly. The last part being the key as it can be easy to over treat a room, especially a small one. For example, in my room I tend to treat corners and seams and forgo the side reflections. You might want to go over to Audio Asylum and check out the Rives Forum. Ethan Weiner and David Aiken are two members who offer very sound advice.

One other thing though not mentioned is something I have tried with success as well. If your system and particularly your speakers allow for it, try near field listening. In this arrangement you sit very close to the speakers, maybe forming an equilateral triangle of 6 - 8'. The benefit of sitting this close is that that you potentially neutralize the room reflections and take the room out of the equation. However, some people do not prefer to sit this close and it does take some getting used to from my experience.

The best antidote to an untreated ,bad sounding room, is to invest in a good set of headphones and a good headphone amp.

In fact I'll go so far as to say, that anyone who is seriously thinking about making component upgrades,should invest in a good headphone set up first.

A lot of people trade one colouration for another and as good as some DIY attempts at room tuning can be( I'm a DIY room tuner, but far from great)most times if you don't know what's on your cd or record in the first place, you'll never know if adding a ton of acoustic fabric has done more harm than good.

Then again, there are other options for the folks who don't have their own dedicated listening rooms and are at the mercy of their wives.

Try some room correcting audio black boxes.
Lots of them out there , some are quite pricey,but some are now being built into two channel integrated-re Harmon Kardon, so all hope for better sound is not hinged just on how many(if any)absorbing panels and tube traps the wife gives her consent to.

The refernce to headphones was meant to illustrate what our gear can sound like when the room is taken out of the picture.It's not to imply that what you hear thru the phones is perfect.It's also coloured, but the colourations are not those of the room.

It's just somthing to compare when you start down the room tuning path.

If the life is sucked out of the cymbals and you've lost any sense of the air and life around the instruments compared to what you hear thru the phones, then you'll know you've added too much.

And just as you can have too little room tuning, you can also overdo it.

I have followed a lot of the tips from the Master book of acoustics by Everet,it's a great place to start.

I started with the corners of the room and then worked my way to the reflection points and the wall behind the speakers. It's fairly easy to determine where or what you need by playing some music and walking around the room. In an untreated room you will get bass build up in the corners for example. Also, if you do the "clap" test and get echo, that's bad. You may not have to treat the ceiling if you have carpet and rugs on the floor, but with hardwood the ceiling will need treatment. I have had good luck with Acoustimac. There products are well built, the service has been excellent and there are many color choices. I like bass traps with the tapperd sides for example.

Why don't you check out Rives Audio? I worked with them and am very happy with the results. They can come up with treatments that are very WAF-compliant, and still work very well.