How to diagnose the need for room treatment?

Here is a useful chart to explain how the speaker will sound. You can see why B&W would choose to voice it this particular way: bass string pluck, drum and guitar attack and vocal presence will all be increased- giving the impression of more detail compared to a flat power response.

Of course some people believe that measurements are like the zodiac and reading the position of planets ....i.e. "completely meaningless" ....just don't tell that to the engineers mixing/mastering your music. They use many rules of thumb based on measurements - a good engineer will know exactly what to do to create a desired effect and so will a speaker designer....

Shadorne -- Thanks for the good explanation and the good reference!

Regards,
-- Al

Shadrone/Almarg - Good point about beaming in HF and the effect of tinkering with toe-in. But with speakers 11 ft away, and with only a six ft spread, you really are not that far off axis to begin with.

Shadrone, "The bass response is superb...". Obviously I agree, but let me say that I never thought it was suspicious. It actually resembled my bass frequencies before I tweeked the set up a bit (without using any acoustic crutches, which I still do not need). For fun, and for illustration of the benefits of position tweaking for Lewinskih.

My set up is as follows, in a 13.5x19.5x9 ft room with the speakers 58" from the wall behind them, 9' apart and the listening spot (ear location) at either 52" or 36" from the back wall.

........52"....36"
1000 0db db0
200hz 0db 0 db
160 -1db 0 db
125 +2db +3db
100 +1db -2db
80 0db -2db
60 -2db -1db
50 -5db -4db
40 -4db -3db
32 +1db +4db

One might think that the bass response at 36 inches would be better because it is smoother and it has some beneficial (I think) boost at 32hz, like the poster. But to my ears, any linearity one might loose, the gain in imaging by moving the listening position forward 16 inches was huge.

Shadrone, I want to thank you for bringing to my attention something (some time ago in another post) about the creation of a null on the center line of the room. I've since moved my listening position and speakers off center line and it has helped in getting a more balanced frequency response whereas nulls had previously been a problem.

IMHO, of course, just a mid-day stream of (un)consciousness. :-)

Nice.

Newbee: thanks for sharing your experience in your room. Your freq response does resemble indeed the shape of mine!BTW, how far is the listening position from the speakers?

Al: the speakers are indeed facing straight ahead. I gather beaming refers to high freq, right? Shadorne's [very interesting] explanation seems to suggest beaming in the mids. I have no clue what the dispersion of the mids driver is. Anyway, as Newbee said, at 11 ft away it would seem dispersion would be wide enough, right?

Bottom line, what I'm taking away is:
a) frequency response looks "good enough". No need to get into bass traps, resonators, diffusors, etc.
b) imaging is likely to be improved by moving speakers further apart (will try it for fun)
c) playing with speaker location might improve things some, particularly if they are exciting a room mode

Are these fair takeaways?

Thank you!!

Re distance - 10 ft from the plane of the speakers (10 1/2' from each speaker itself).

Re takaways - IMHO, yes.