Hi Axiom_man and all,
I want to issue a cautionary note here. While I don't advocate long stretches of bare, highly reflective walls to either side of your listening room, I want to point out that first and secondary reflections from the sides of a room, largely produced by the off-axis dispersion of the front left and right main speakers (and, to a lesser degree, the center channel) generate important psycho-acoustic cues that add a sense of spaciousness and breadth to the soundstage, whether it's multi-channel movie soundtrack playback or simple stereo.
Much of Dr. Floyd Toole's early work in speaker measurement and testing (I sat on the listening panels for lots of tests) at the National Research Council Acoustics lab indicated that in typical rectangular living rooms furnished with normal domestic objects--rugs on the floor, bookcases or the like on the wall, upholstered furniture--the smoother and wider the off-axis frequency responses were for a particular speaker, and the closer they reflected the on-axis response measurements (in anechoic measurements), the more "spacious" and "realistic" the soundstage was perceived in double-blind listening tests.
So leave those first and secondary reflections alone, and do NOT overdamp your room. You'll end up with a dead-sounding space. I've seen too many over-"treated" rooms that had a kind of dead, sucked-out quality that was almost akin to listening on headphones to a dry studio recording.
If you add a lot of absorbent panels to dampen and soak up first and secondary reflections, you'll lose much of the desired spacious quality that well-designed speakers like Axioms with wide laterl dispersion generate.
One room I recently visited that was "professionally treated" had exactly those dry, sucked-out qualities. It was almost like listening to music in an anechoic chamber (a room with no echos). Paradoxically, this prominent reviewer's family room, which had no special acoustic treatment delivered a much more satisfying listening experience. And the bass in that room (from one EP500 subwoofer) had greater extension and power than the over-treated listening room, where four subwoofers were operating.
There is a place for bass traps when you have impossible standing wave problems; however, more often than not, the addition of a second subwoofer will greatly smooth out deep bass distribution to multiple listening locations.
Regards,
