[michael green MGA]

Lots of schools of thought when it comes to acoustics. I don't come from the math side of room designing necessarily. I've had to fix too many golden rooms to say that is the way to go. Here's what you want to think about. You basically are going to come down the two camps. The first one is kill the sound hoping your system will make some what of a straight line to your ear and be pretty fair sounding at that. Obviously this is not my camp. Camp two, treat your room like an extension of your speakers. In reality the room is your loudspeaker. The more time goes on the more I see people turning from the kill it method and moving toward a room that gets along with or even amplifies the signal.

For 30 some years now (getting olds as the hills) I've lived by one main rule. Make rooms sound like I want my music to sound like. The best sounding rooms work off of this simple method. If you want your room to sound dead or parts of the music missing, kill it with a bunch of deadening materials. If you want it live, make the materials in the room give you a nice full range balance. Remember live in tune is exactly what instruments do. I've seen thousands of people try to defeat the laws of natural acoustics and have watch listeners spend the rest of their time and money trying to fix what they have ruined.

With a little studying you can make a decision between straight line acoustics or pressure zone controlling. I don't believe in the first but go with PZC tuning all the way. If you build a good sounding room with good sounding materials and control where the room naturally builds up pressure you will be amazed with the results.

Last, think of what distortion is. Distortion is the plus or minus of a signal out of tune. Many are listening to the distortion of over dampening their rooms and that's why they are struggling so hard and replacing their equipment so often trying to get it to sound right together. It can't sound right together if the room is missing half the music being played.

[JLM]

I agree with much of what Michael Green says:

We are accustomed to listening in "normal" rooms, so strive for that (the classic Greek "golden ratio" is a good start) with treatments for only identified problems (versus filling the room with absorbing materials, diffusers, and resonators).

Pressure zone effects relate to bass frequencies.  Going strictly beyond room acoustics, the only viable solution is the use of multiple subwoofers.  Visit the "bass place" circle below for ideas.

We listen from within the "larger speaker" (the speaker cabinet is the smaller cabinet).  Again going beyond room acoustics, many of the basic concepts of speaker design and room design shouldn't be all that different.