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Audio room floor question

I know this question has come up before but please indulge me. I'm adding on and am building a room that will serve as my HiFi room. I'm not going the "professional" route but I do want to make the room as HiFi friendly as possible. The dimensions are set so I can't do anything about that. I have a heavy concrete floor poured. What is the best floor covering? I could use hardwood glued, floating hardwood, linoleum, or I could just leave it concrete and add area rugs and pads. I don't want to use carpet as there will be a hallway and an outside door that will bring in snow and mud. Thanks
catfishbob

Showing 2 responses by mapman

mapman's avatar
mapman
21,823 posts
 
In terms of room acoustics, I've found my current thin+ dense carpet + padding over concrete foundation in my two basement rooms I use for serious listening to be ideal. Bass is mostly what you want it to be, not what the room makes it. That provides a lot of flexibility in terms of overall sound quality + tweaks. I would not want to go back to anything else. Maybe the best + most effective tweak I've ever had.
mapman's avatar
mapman
21,823 posts
 
I use both bottom ported OHM Walsh speakers and rear ported Dynaudio monitors. The thin carpet and pad over concrete floor prevents a lot of bass interaction with the floor, especially with the bottom ports. When I use same speakers on the floor above with typical modern plywood flooring under similar carpet, bass can be overwhelming and harder to get under control.

I've also used front ported B&W P6 floorstanders and Magnepan planars in same rooms. Maggies were the least sensitive to flooring type sound wise for sure, but harder to get clean full extended bass out of. Much less interaction with the floor acoustics it seemed with those.
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