Hardwood floors vs Carpet

With parallel hard wood floor and ceiling - added to parallel hard walls, flutter echo is very likely, which will tend to add a "shoutiness" to voices and just plain sound bright overall. You can fix it with rugs, but there are other ways to attack the problem.

One of my systems is in a room with a tiled floor and I use a thick Persian rug covering most of the area between me and the speakers. In this room it is still not really possible to sit more than about 12 feet from the system without the room's reverberent sound dominating. Some speakers sound horrible in the room regardless of how you set them up.

In the end I realised that speakers like Thiels, with wide dispersion were a "no-no" in this room. On the flip-side, speakers that beamed - like Martin-Logans, all other panel speakers and even some British monitor speakers like Spendor - had utterly no problems in the room at all. So, rather than spending megabucks on Persian rugs, you can spend megabucks on some speakers (more fun) that do not have wide dispersion.

Hi Ernie. My Martin Logans beam (as all panels do) in a way that there is no floor bounce of upper frequencies until you are a very long way from the speakers. It is definitely not just a lateral issue. For ML speaker the panel starts a foot or so above floor level and vertical dispersion is not much more than the vertical height of the panel for some distance. The difference in flutter echo in my "problem room" between a panel speaker and a speaker with a dome tweeter is very significant. Even so a rug is required, but with a panel speaker it needs to only be (in my room anyway) about 6ft by 8ft.