Hi all,
Sushi and Eldwyn are correct, more or less. For a domestic home theater, you want a mix of absorptive and reberberant characterisitics. By the way, the "live end/dead end" thesis has been found to be dubious and not supported by acoustical tests.
Keep in mind that for music listening, in stereo or multichannel, the walls to each side of the main speakers should have some reflective qualities, because in all the NRC research on loudspeaker dispersion and its correlation in double-blind listening tests, the speakers that were rated to sound the most "spacious and open" and thus, more natural, had lateral off-axis responses that most closely approximated the on-axis frequency response. Those secondary reflections reach your ears a few milliseconds after the direct sound, but they will NOT reach your ears if the side walls are totally absorptive.
It's always something of a trade-off between movies and music, because you do want to limit ceiling reflections that limit dialog intelligibility (and aren't that important for music); on the other hand, you do want to preserve those lateral sidewall reflections from your main speakers because those will add to the spaciousness of music and movie scores.
The answer? A reasonable mix of domestic type furnishings that reflect and break up some sounds as well as some absorption (carpet or rugs, a few draperies, etc.) And yes, listeners that describe some Axiom speakers as "bright" are usually describing the unnatural acoustics of their room.
Regards,
