How U determine first and second reflection points


Someone told me following a while ago in room teak thread, but I don't think I understand it well. Any comments?
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Have someone sit in the primary listening location, take a mirror to the side walls opposite each speaker and move it until the seated person can see the speaker reflected in the mirror. These are your first reflection points. Start from there.
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eandylee
Not saying that at all - sound reflects in staight lines (many, many, many straight lines - it does not zoom around corners, honest), and when the waves bounce back they cancel each other out at a certain place (standing waves). The way to stop that is to not allow them to reflect back.
Oh never mind, everyone else seems to understand just fine...Yes the earth is flat, and intelligent design is a science - happy now?
Ok.....so now if the speheres collide and bounce off the walls ,and off of each other.We get a problem with standing waves or /nodes.By killing some of the frequencies or musical notes.....All you have accomplished is the death of your music.The spheres will continue to collide.Only now you chopped away most of the vital info in your room by killing it.When you move your speakers around all you do is move the pressure zones about.Big spheres ,small spheres,all your rooms are individual as your are.So you cannot tell what a pressure zone is doing to your friends system. Controlling the waves and nodes.When you learn not to kill ,but to control and use the full energy of your room and system.Live music is never killed....You are trying to remove the walls out of the whole equation.Your little nearfield triangles do a very good job of this ,but then your stuck on hearing the character of your gear.At low volumes.....
The ceiling wall junctions all around the room should be treated as reflection areas. To me these are the critical areas to treat not to kill but to redirect the pressure back at the listening position. You want the energy that usually flows along the surface of these large planes to become a part of the overall experience..Tom
Uh, how the hell did a simple question that was answered very well by the first several posters turn to a 30 reply thread?
Man, some audiophiles are weird.

David
One needs to careful not to over damp a room. Reflected sound may not be such a big issue because sound levels follow an inverse square law, even untreated walls absorb some portion of the sound that hits them and the Haas Effect allows the brain to suppress a large part of the reflected sound. Most of the domestically acceptable room treatments are not broad band and introduce a change in the tonal balance between the direct and reflected sound which the ear/brain tags as a hallmark of artificially produced sound. If soundstage info is your paramount listening concern, then it could make some sense to suppress first and second reflection points, but if proper tonal balance is more important, then heavily damping a typical home listening room is heading in the wrong direction.

Please don't construe my comments to be anti room treatments. Properly designed and installed broad band absorption systems can work wonders for the proper reproduction of sound. It's just that the best rooms I've been in for long term listening all have a combination of reflective and absorptive surfaces.