Room treatment-I was afraid of this


There I was with a dedicated room-not ideal being nearly square and a less than 8' ceiling-and barely adequate music, not awful but the system had sounded better. I tried moving things about some with differing results but nothing satisfying. Part of the problem was moving from a 30x35 foot room with an 18' ceiling. I was used to the speakers being well out into the room, far apart and sitting pretty far away. I used the odd integer matrix method promoted by Vandersteen but hadn't considered either placing them closer to the wall or moving near field. Nick at GIK recommended both, as well as some furniture rearranging that made a very pleasant difference. That was all the encouragement I needed to order bass traps, 1st and 2nd reflection panels and front and rear wall treatments. Installed them by about 4pm Monday and listened until 2 am, back at it last night from 3pm-1am. It's just as so many have said, this is a serious component upgrade. It is matched in scale only when I went from Vandersteen 2CE's to Chapman T-77SE's. Not a single aspect of the listening experience that isn't enhanced. So now the problem; I suppose a lot of the glowing stuff folks make of cables, power cords, fuses, and on and on also make significant differences. How long can it be before I'm off and running on that stuff?
128x128wideload
I started out with absorption behind my speakers and now have diffusors that I made out of wood.  It really helped to open up the soundstage and smooth out the bass.
I found that paying an electrician to run 10 gage stranded wire to high quality outlets was cheeper and had a better impact than power cords. 
The room was designed as a dedicated listening room with all walls and the cealing not parallel, false walls with acoustic damping applied and a bookcase on the front wall full of different sized books and dispersion panels and built in bass traps. 
The room cost was much less than top end SC and IC cost and was well worth the effort. 
Of course if the house is sold some ones going to think I had a crappy carpenter to have a wall 1 foot out of square in 15 feet ;-)