I knew room treatments were in my future.


For those of you that have been following my posts. I bought a new house, leaving my great 24' square listening room of 36 years. The best prospect is the basement room 12'x 18'. Home for my new Hegel H390. Thick carpet, concrete block on the end wall and one 18' side. The other side is 2x4 construction with paneling. 
My dealer said he can help with treatments. 
Bryston A2 wired speakers. 
My best guess is placing my speakers from the 12' wall towards the 18' end. 
Thanks for any suggestions.
golden210
GIK suggestion is good.  Know why they test flight airplanes?  Because you never know until it’s real.  Good starting point, but then you will need to start experimenting for YOUR system and YOUR ears.  Enjoy the ride.
In my last house I used ASC tube traps. When I moved and built my current room I went with Real Traps. Both rooms are located in the basement and are basically the same size. 
I was able to try both in my current room and sold the ASC traps. The soundstage was much better with the Real Traps.

@golden210,Your new room is not small. I would call it medium. I am in a similar situation as you are - room in the basement with 2 solid concrete walls and 2, 2X4 walls with double drywall (on each side) glued together with Green Glue acoustic compound. This minimizes the sound leaks. I use GIK treatments in my room. The A2 seems front ported, which should be fine in that space you have. The tri-traps in the corners will help tame the bass.
Good luck.
Asc tube traps , recommend them without hesitation. Send them pics of your room , your equipment and your flavor in music . They will tune the room for your flavor/taste . I recommend Jordan he is super helpful . 
The room sim application inside of Room EQ Wizard is quite helpful for determining optimal speaker placement to minimize room modes.  GIK is an excellent source for information on both their website and their service.  You can make excellent panels using Guilford of Maine covering, 1 X 4's and Mineral Wool or Owens Corning 703 and have GIK make the harder stuff such as corner bass traps. GIK's prices are excellent and I try to procure even the DIY products through them.    
^^^This.I did the exact recommendation. Lots of of pictures.

I just received my GIK acoustic panels the other day.

The designer I worked with, Mike, was very helpful. mike.m@gikacoustics.com
@ebm

Stillpoint Apatures get 4 ASAP for the best sound.
Are those $750 each? You're recommending he get 4 of them right away? Or am I looking up the wrong things?
They really work great if you only start with 2 put them at the first reflection point.If you feel there to expensive buy somthing else however i fell they are the best i had Tube Traps before these are much better.Good luck!!
@ebm 

And at $750 each you think they're good enough to try *even before* doing an analysis of the room? If so, that's very high praise indeed!
Really dislike ASC for a couple of reasons, price and performance.  I went to a show in Oakland sponsored by ASC, and almost every room had Tube Traps galore.
The rooms sounded terrible.  They were not better to listen to in the mid to treble, and the bass, while clear, became 1 note.  It was as if all the rooms were playing the same song in the bass.  It sounded like the TT were imposing their own character on the room instead of taking the room out of the equation.

The couple of rooms I found which used traditional panels sounded MUCH better.
@golden210

@ebm

To each his own. I found pillows in the corners behind the speakers to work better than Stillpoints Apetures, actually much better. My dealer has many of Aperture's, and in his room, they seem to work OK.

I moved to GIK Impressions corner traps a few months ago, and @ $470/pair delivered, they provide much more room treatment for the $$. They definitely work better than the pillows. I'm sort of debating with myself whether to buy first reflection treatment now. I'm not really sure I have a first reflection problem though and never thought I did.
I will dump all my Stillpoints and throw bankets on the floor instead(HO HO).Everybody has an opinion good luck with ugly pillows  in your listening room.
For me, I'd measure first, then try the less expensive ideas, listen and measure again, and only after that spend $750 each for Stillpoints. The idea that this is could be the *first* thing suggested is pretty rash.
I think its part of ebm’s humorZ. He seems to suggest a ridiculously expensive option and then to act asap.  LoL, kinda funny really
I wonder how many people have purchased expensive treatments and tweaks only to find they just needed to clean their ears. 
@b_limo Oh, so it's humor not advice! I thought s/he was being serious. Word up!
Might check out ATS Acoustics, Piper City, Illinois. Nice web site. Supply pre made panels and DIY. 
With a converted basement room 13' x 20', speaker placement for me worked best along the short wall.  Speakers are about 1 1/2' from each wall and 8 1/2' apart.  Listening area about 9' from speakers.  This gave more area behind to deal with reflections, etc., and gave a better soundstage and "open" sound, especially with a small number of instruments/singers on quality recordings.  In other words, it made it sound like I was listening in a larger room.

Others have made good room treatment suggestions.  I went the DIY route with 2' x 2' and  2' x 4' panels with Knauf insulation from GIK, (much easier to work with than Owen Corning stuff).  Besides the typical bass traps placed at 45 degree angles in the corners and the first and second reflection points, I was surprized how panels placed on the ceiling also helped with controlling higher frequency congestion, (ceilings are 7 1/2').  

Room EQ Wizard as a starting point, then moved the panels to preference.  Good luck finding what works best for you creating your new listening room.
Good advice here to use REW. Also free is HolmImpulse. I recommend you heed the advice and familiarise yourself with either of these essential tools and read up on what is needed to optimise the room behaviour.

Someone suggested contacting a company to help you with products to suit the type of music you like? It does not work that way.

I will try and keep this short. Bass traps will have the biggest affect and paradoxically also improve the midrange and tops. But the bass traps need to be generously sized because low frequencies have long wavelengths. The dinky little bits of foam that Amazon sells are totally useless. All domestic rooms need bass traps.


The object here is to get the sound in your room to decay by 60dB within a certain time frame, known as T60, across the spectrum. This is about 400ms for the average size room. REW will allow you to measure this and the waterfall plots (CSD) will provide data on the decay time and show the peaks and nulls. Now you add the bass traps and measure again. The CSD,s will now show that the peaks have been tamed and the nulls and partial nulls have filled in, so smoothing the response. The peaks were making mud out of the sound and the filling in of nulls will provide music info that was partially missing.

Broad-band absorption panels can be introduced to reduce any long decay time above the Schroeder frequency where the sound becomes a reverberant field. Below that it is a modal region and is where the bass traps work.

This may sound daunting but get started and it falls into place. Know that this will elevate your sound beyond any component upgrade. If you're handy then DIY will save a bunch. Google super-chunk bass traps.

Advice to wall-to-wall carpet and hang drapes everywhere is to be avoided. I can see guys raising their eyebrows at this. W to W carpet and drapes will be  narrow-band absorbers and target just a very limited range of frequencies. Because the carpet is everywhere the affect is to mostly remove those frequencies. This is not what is wanted. Better to have a scatter rug or two. Better still is to prevent floor/ceiling bounce by hanging about a 4ft. X 8ft. panel overhead.

To take it further consider multiple subs such as a DBA which in combination with some acoustic correction will amaze, thrill and astound you.



 


Oh and to retain your sanity it's probably best to just ignore ebm. I am sure he is a nice guy when he hasn't forgotten to take his meds.
 ASC tube traps are super expensive and in my experience, not very effective.
Panels are much more effective.