* your wall-to-wall carpet will absorb much high end energy so you will need to pay attention to how you treat your room's surfaces so as not to create a dead sounding room with low reverb time for middle and high frequencies. Try using reflection (i.e. bare wall) and diffusion for middle and upper frequencies and absorption for bass frequencies.
Hi Kevin, I liked all your suggestions but might slightly disagree with the above.
The best room I ever heard was a room that I "didn't" hear. ANY, and I mean ANY reflected sound is a distortion to the original signal.
Go into the best movie theaters built (I have a lot in my area) and they are sonically DEAD. I have a huge MANN here in Westwood and if you arrive early you will sit in sonically dead silence, sans the conversations that go on around you which are now MUCH MORE clear because you don't have echo, reverb and reflection.
It is a nasty rumor/myth that acoustically dead rooms don't sound good when the Music or Movie is playing. Unless you need reflective surfaces for Dipole Speakers to function better, it is my opinion that the sound will be MUCH more accurate, clear and certainly less phase/time distorted when reflections are reduced or eliminated.
Just my opinion of course.
Yes, I have spend thousands of hours listening in near anechoic conditions, which is the question I often get. While a SUPER DEAD room sounds strange when no music is playing, (as it should) when the music begins, the purity is unbeleivable.
This is also true of LIGHT. If you have a front projection system, the LESS LIGHT and Reflected Light you allow in the room the more accurate, clear and precise the picture will look.
Hope that makes sense and maybe begins to dispel some of the incorrectly held beleifs about "using" reflected sound to pump up a specific frequency range. Distortion is never a good idea, and reflected sound IS distorted sound to the original signal or sound from the speaker.