Living room remodel. Flooring advice?!

We are about to remodel our living room / dining room (all one big room basically) and the wife has decided on wood laminate flooring (pergo, etc).

Am I committing acoustic suicide compared to having carpet in the room? We do have a 8x10 rug and a fairly large cloth couch in the room. Any advice on this situation? Should I not worry about it?

I currently have the M22ti's, VP150, MB Quart 12" Sub and MB Quart surrounds (saving up for the QS8's!).

In reply to:
Am I committing acoustic suicide

NO... but the sound will be a little different.

the rug will help, as will furniture and wall items. you basically want to try and reduce the amount of large hard surfaces that the sound will have to reflect or bounce off of. it creates the echoing that can kill a good HT set-up. you want items in there that can absorb sound. but, i have never heard of anyone complain that the HT was ruined.

so, i reckon you will be ok.. just break up the hard surfaces, and allow your ears an adjustemtn period, and i think you will be fine.. and send us some pics of the new floor and HT when completed.

bigjohn

I have hard wood in my living room, plus log walls and a whole bunch of windows. Sounds just dandy to me. I put an area rug in front of the speakers, couldn't tell a difference, other that the ladies think it's ugly. But they didn't like the dirt bike either, so what do they know...

Pergo's not bad... it's a floating floor system and it's quite a bit less reflective than say, a good solid 1/2" oak strip floor.

What might be a really good compromise would be cork flooring. It's gorgeous... acoustically it's really nice... but it marks VERY easily - ask someone who set up "redheads" (Strand-Century 650s/1Ks) all over a house with cork flooring to light it for a brag video for the builder - that's how I learned about it... it looked like some kind of laminate, but baby, the stands left marks like cork!

Bren R.

I have ceramic tiles throughout the first floor of my home and my system sounds great. I also have almost nothing on the walls which adds to the rooms reflective qualities. I just played with all my speaker settings until I found a sound I liked. I only moved in last year so I'll decorate the walls sooner or later, which will help.

I'm sure it would sound different with wall to wall carpeting, but I live in Florida and go jetskiing a lot and wanted a floor that was easy to clean. I do have a big floor rug directly in front of my system which I'm sure helps a great deal.

Check out the link in my signature to see pictures of my room.