Best Carpet Padding

Why should the floor be treated differently from any other reflective surface? If you heavily pad the floor then heavily pad the rest. If your walls and ceilings are reflective why should the floor be inert? Because emphasizing slap-echo is inherently preferable? Or maybe fine tuning comb-filtering for maximum interference is your thing? Less is often-times more, IMHO.

Metaphysics, you now astonish me. You state that vertical and front-to-back info (ie,soundstage) comes ONLY from the left and right speakers. I must disagree. By your logic headphones should have the best 3-D imaging (pure left-right signal to the ears, correct?). Suffice it to say they do not. It is the complex interaction of the primary signal of a speaker in 3-dimensional space with its multiple reflections that creates the illusion of a soundstage. And it is easy to grossly imbalance these reflections by overdamping only one of the six parallel reflective surfaces found in the usual listening room(ie the floor). I never said the floor shouldn't be damped. My point is that it can be OVERDAMPED which will skew but not necessarily improve the soundstage. That's what this thread was all about: thick vs thin padding. Thin might sound better.

A "psychoacoustic" example: Unless your room is anechoic there will ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS be a first reflection from SOMEWHERE! Moving it off the floor by overdamping it simply changes the source of the first reflection, which may NOT improve the soundstage.

Meta, with all due respect, if you can't smooch Diana perhaps your carpet padding is too thick.

Metaphysics, I understand your point but think you missed mine. What you say about the floor's proximity to the drivers is of course correct. But overly damping the floor will simply change the SOURCE of the first reflection that hits the ears and thus smears the sound, usually to the ceiling or one of the side walls. There is ALWAYS a first reflection that smears the sound. Grossly imbalanced damping of parallel reflective surfaces can result in worse sound than no damping at all. Would you leave a left side-wall totally clear while treating the right side-wall with multiple inches of polyurethane and wool, simply because the right side-wall was closer to your ear? Why do the same to the ceiling and the floor? Is there something inherently different about vertical and horizontal reflections that I don't get? My experience is that BALANCED damping of parallel reflective surfaces sounds better than imbalanced regardless of the surfaces' spatial orientation. FWIW.

Metaphysics, you astound me. You reduce stereo imaging to one dimension: "Everything about our current playback systems is based on left to right/horizontal differences"; "Stereo imaging is based SOLELY on differences between left and right(horizontal). Those of us who listen in 3-D might ask: what about up/down, what about front/back? If stereo imaging is solely horizontally derived, why damp the floor at all?

Metaphysics, your meta-logic is meta-evident. If I'd interpreted your meta-English sooner, I'd have called myself collect and reversed the charges. And saved us both the trouble. Well, maybe one of us.