[Laundrew]

I have noticed that a few members have hardwood flooring in their Listening/Home Theatre rooms, by the way - awesome rooms! A future renovation that I am considering is to install hardwood flooring in my Listening room. I am curious if hardwood flooring in audio rooms requires extra room treatments over their carpeted flooring counterparts. Is there really a great difference in the sound quality between these two flooring options

Thanks,

Be well...   

[Viajero5000]

Hi Laundrew,

I once set up my system in a room with a hardwood floor and little damping in the way of rugs/curtains/furniture etc.  It was a bit of a nightmare: too many reflections, scattered sound-stage, no weight to the bass, echoes etc. Wouldn't recommend it at all as I had to get a carpet and more furniture into the room to rectify the situation. It was never quite 'there' though.

[Mag]

My basement room is unfinished with a false wooden floor and area rugs. I think the false floor works good in that it absorbs more than reflect sound. This would not be satisfactory for a finished room so you would have to finish with something more visually appealing.

Have you considered a rubber floor? There is a product out there, been awhile since I read about it, that I thought would be great for an audio room. I was thinking more that if I lived in an apartment this rubber flooring would be good for reducing bass frequencies to the apartment below, might have good audio qualities too.

[KeithA]

I like carpet...especially my carpet 



Hardwood with a great area rug would be no different IMHO

Keith

[arthurs]

I am in the process of remodeling my room and hired an acoustic engineer for the job.  His recommendation that we are going with is true hardwood, hand sanded and finished, then covering a significant area with carpet so you end up with a relative amount of each.  The room is 20W x 23L, we will be using two carpets.  The front wall carpet will be 15W x 8L (from the wall to a couple feet in front of my speakers, the rear carpet is 15w x 7L and will be start about 18" out from the rear wall.  Effectively I will have hardwood 2.5' around the perimeter (excpet the front wall) and a 6' wood path across the center of the room.  I haven't heard it yet, but this guy is pretty well regarded so I can't imagine he would steer me into a disaster.  Caveat is this treatment is tied in with everything else we are doing to the room, so it's possible it may not apply to every situation.