Most rooms don’t need acoustical treatment.

Of course. Because that is nothing to do with it. In fact, of all the different ideas audiophiles have about what they are trying to do, to recreate the sound the recording engineers heard in the studio has got to be the furthest from it you can get! 

I mean, think about it. Sinatra-Basie was done back in 1962. Are we supposed to have systems that make it sound like it did coming off those 1950's era speakers? With all their colorations? I don't think so! 

Some think the goal is to recreate the sound of the original performance. This is a little closer to the truth. This is also probably a lot closer to what the producer and recording engineers were trying to do. Capture the sound of the performance. 

But still, not quite right. Closer to the truth to say they are trying to capture the spirit of the performance. The feeling. The vibe. Otherwise, why place microphones inside drums, and stuff like that? See? Who ever sat with their head inside a kick drum?   

So why on Earth would anyone talk about recreating the sound heard in the studio? It is nuts. 

What they do instead, they create art. Auditory art. Just like Picasso did not draw a woman to look anything like what you see with your eyes, but he did somehow capture the spirit of woman. Not "a" woman. Woman. That kind of thing.  

What we do with our systems is put our auditory art on display.   

I was in the home one time of a man who was really into Remington. No not the guns, the bronze sculpture artist. He must have had 20 of them, with the best ones in a living room. Wired with lights and a panel he could push a button and the lighting would fade out on one and fade in on another. Or several at one time. Just amazing.  

Probably Remington never had anything like this in his studio. Probably Picasso never saw any of his paintings under MOMA lighting.  

I wonder, are there art snobs who would sniff at how they were there in the loft and they never have seen any of his paintings that looked anything like what they did there? A perfectly good metaphor that shows how silly it is to try and recreate the sound in the studio. 

I know what you mean but the answer is: apparently not.

You clearly have not heard very many power cords. D'oh!

Right. Well said. There are simply too many notes. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vci4wM6jDDM

There are two basic issues in rooms: absorption and reflection.

Yes. And timing. Three basic issues. And the relationship of direct to indirect sound. Okay four basic issues. Well, and the timing and relative volume of reflected sounds. Dang alright five basic... what? Aww come on, you got to be kidding me! Construction of ceiling, walls, and floor. But that's the last basic issue! No kidding! I am drawing the line at 6! Noise? What do you mean, noise coming in? Or noise going out?! Crap! No freaking way. Plug up the outlets, seal up the door, whatever you do make believe we didn't just go to 7 basic issues.....

The lower the frequency the longer the wavelength and so therefore the larger the treatment must be. Low bass waves are 50 ft and more so bass traps are relatively large. I had one in my room, tried it all over the place, it is now hanging from the ceiling where it does a great job absorbing the high volume output from my Delta Unisaw. Yeah my shop has some old discarded acoustic panels too. Would call it a dedicated sawing room but that would be a groaner, it does have quite good acoustics though, for a shop. 

So in my room one was too much. There's more than one way of doing this. Townshend Podiums cleaned up my bass a huge amount, without any of the problems of the bass traps. I'm not the only one to notice this either. So watch out, a lot of people have a knee-jerk reaction that it must be the room. Sometimes they may even be right.

What a bass trap does is act like a shock absorber that dampens resonance. Any normal room the bass waves hit a wall, or ceiling, floor, bounce back, and then basically bounce back and forth until gradually the sound fades out. This takes a big fraction of a second or longer during which time the bass is reverberating in the room adding to the volume of bass you hear, and also the reflections make the sound of the original bass note less distinct and clear. What people call muddy or bloated bass. 

Bass traps are designed to absorb some of this pressure wave. So yes you hear less bass. But they affect mostly the later reflected resonant bass not  the initial bass coming off the speaker. So the bass you are left with is less but more clear. 

This is exactly the same as when you put a small panel on a wall that absorbs midrange or treble. You hear a little less mid and top end, but what you do hear is more clear and distinct. 

Surprise- you're right. Sort of. Most rooms do have lots of different kinds of furniture in lots of different places, which do serve to diffuse and absorb and break up a lot of the worst flutter echo one would have in an empty room.  

But that is about it. And notice, it's all random. Because of this it does no good to talk about "most rooms" because no one really cares about "most" they care about "their" room. As soon as we move from the hypothetical home of the scoundrel to the particular home of the individual then acoustic treatment can suddenly matter a lot. 

The physics and acoustics of standard acoustical treatment are very well understood. At the end of the envelope where extreme performance is paramount the science verges into art. But the science behind things like first reflections, arrival times, and bass attenuation traps is solid. It works. As does a lot of stuff much harder to explain. But you might want to keep in mind that just because we cannot explain why something works, does not mean it does not in fact work. Happens all the time. Can you explain how your car works? Yet it does.