Getting a shared living space to sound "right" can be a monumental challenge, given SOAF considerations such as esthetics priorities; functional issues such as room shape and layout, foot-traffic patterns, and virtually inflexible furniture placement dictated by available space; and the overarching imperative of maintaining domestic peace and tranquility.
As some of you know from a thread begun in this forum in June 2014 (my, how time flies), I'd coped with these issues in bringing the main-audio-system space to heel with the indispensable advice and assistance of GIK's Glenn Kuras, Bryan Pape, and Christina Stone. Well, I'm now back at it again, this time working to tame the even more problematic bedroom-system listening space.
Normally, the bedroom, with its complement of eBay-acquired used or customer-returned components and a QVC special-sale i7 Windows 10 laptop as the program source, would constitute a "secondary" listening venue. But there's only one TV in the house, and that's parked in the main system's space. If one of us wants to watch "The Bachelor" (emphatically not me) and the other wants to listen to music, the bedroom becomes the primary listening area out of necessity. Its size and layout render it an even bigger acoustics challenge than the main-system space. And there's no "listening chair" in there. Depending on how you want to characterize it, I park, sprawl, or lay out on the bed with my ears positioned at about mid-bed, so I'm out close to four feet from the rear wall when I listen.
Having already treated the main system, I had the advantage of "borrowing" GIK panels from what my wife prefers to call "the living/dining room" to test placement configurations in the bedroom. What I finally came up after exhaustive listening to a wide variety of hi-rez downloads and CD rips of classical, jazz, film scores, vocal standards, choral, and opera is shown here.
The front wall--a pair of full-range 244's and a 12"x48" Monster. The asymmetrical placement of the panels reflects the fact that positioning at the right front corner is impractical because a door opens into it:
The back wall--two scatter-plate 244's and a 12"x48" Monster:
A full-range 244 at the right first-reflection point (in front of LP storage):
A full-range 244 at the left first-reflection point:
Trap placement diagram:
Trapping the room this way has effected significant improvements in instrumental, vocal, and ensemble articulation, bass tautness, imaging, and soundstage depth. But since significant speaker boundary interference response issues remain due to the unavoidable proximity of necessary furniture (you can see from the diagram that I don't have much room to work with), I'll attempt to amerliorate SBIR issues by (1) building new sand-filled speaker stands to raise the Paradigm Studio 20's five inches and (2) building a new, lower-profile audio equiment rack, a "flexy" rod-and-shelf arrangement that presents less reflective surface to the left speaker.
Even with its limitations, the current configuration enables a more open, better-defined sonic presentation than heard in the room's formerly untreated state. And my wife has indicated that she'll find a new location for the jewel cases that presently occupy the top of the dresser (with their faces covered by some packing foam I found in a desperate search for
something that might reduce the reflective mass that speaker output "sees" while I tested the setup). Once she heard the improvement--and that took all of about three minutes--she said she didn't mind that I'd moved some wall prints to accommodate the traps.