the Listening Room

Thank you all for your responses thus far. Some of these response are a little bit what I expected--some are not. I would like to comment on a few. First is aesthetics. Room acoustics do not have to be ugly. If you have an existing room and you want to do it very inexpensively, the ugly treatment will get you there. But for really, very little money, acoustical treatment can virtually disappear. In new construction, there is never a good reason to show acoustical treatment, as it can be less expensive and often work better when it's built in. The second issue is functionality. This, so far, has only come up a few times but I feel like it is tremendously important. When designing (or re-designing a room) you really have to take into account total functionality. Will the room be used to entertain, do you have children or pets that like to play with those knobs and chew on the hose like stuff coming out of the back of the speaker. These are very important real world issues and any acoustical engineer that is designing a listening room for the home needs to be attentive to these things. Unfortunately, many think they are designing a room for a studio. The home environment is not a studio. The one that can be very challenging, and came up twice is the open floor plan. This can be difficult particularly if you have a situation that has a lot of "hard" surfaces and little way to cover them without harming the aesthetics. These rooms take a lot of time to figure out, but we have had some result in stellar sound that was better than some of the small rooms we've done.
Again, thank you, this is all very helpful to me and please continue with more rooms.

Thanks again to everyone. It's very helpful to understand the thoughts on the room from those that have not used an acoustical engineering service. Dovetail in particular--that is the room I like designing. There is so much more to the room than JUST the acoustics. The acoustics should disappear and blend with the surroundings so that it all seems effortless in achieving great sound. And of course, if it's designed right, you don't need tone controls--it's only when we are stuck in sub optimal rooms that parametric (not really tone controls) adaptation is required. Anyone that took the time to post here, I appreciate it. As such, if anyone who posted here has any specific questions about their room please e-mail me. No, I'm not going to do room design for you, but if you have a specific question about an aspect of your room, e-mail me and hopefully I will have some suggestions for you to try.

Gajgmusic: While your situation is unique--it is not so unique. Everyone has certain things about the room they can not or will not change for one reason or another (WAF, kids, aesthetics, etc.) This is very normal and must be considered in any type of design. I think this is one of the main barriers to hiring an acoustical design group, and something that I really feel compelled to respond to. In any group that is worth their salt there should be several important stages in the process. The first is the "discovery" stage. That handles what we are dealing with, what is the room like, what does the client want, what things can or can not be changed. The second is a preliminary concept (or ate least understanding the boundaries and the possibilties within those boundaries), i.e. "We can do this, but you might need to move this or add a rug etc". This stage is just to see if the client is willing to do what is necessary to get a rewarding listening environment. At this point either there can not be a good compromise to get good acoustical results, or there is agreement on what needs to be done. If there is agreement in principle, then it is time to come up with a full plan including a budget, schedule and payment. If not, then nothing else is done, and no one has paid anything. What I am basically saying is that you should have nothing to lose in giving a acoustical group a design and saying "can something be done to help me?" They might say, "Yes if you move the piano"--which you aren't willing to do and thus they may not be able to help. We use an "application form" to start our design processes and the reason is so that we can understand if we really can help our client--if not we let them know.