Does the first reflection point actually matter??

Mahgister,
Please make case for how front ported bookshelf speakers are impacted by room acoustics while listening to them in the near field? 3-4 feet. I don't think my ears are that good. Joe

Mahgister,
Please make case for how front ported bookshelf speakers are impacted by room acoustics while listening to them in the near field? 3-4 feet. I don’t think my ears are that good. Joe

What i just said has nothing to do with my alleged hearing accuracy.... I am not a bat first point...

Second point i know what i speak about because modifications of the room acoustic change the imaging and even the tonal timbre perception, i know it by EXPERIENCE....

Between nearfield and regular listening there is ONLY a degree of variation of the relation, NEVER a complete separation, between the direct waves and the indirect one and their synchronisation.... What we perceive is always a reconstructed "informed wave", that is the sum of these 2, by the brain Fourier analyser... By the way my active controls resonators grids act also like some fixed beacons through these flowing waves helping the brain to recover the information and recreate it from the resulting complex waves of the room coming from many obstructions and devices....Nobody listen only to direct wave in a room nevermind where you seat.......

There is NO case for arguing with experiments and experience....You ears are probably better than mine i am 69 years old but i hear very well for my age, my ears are informed by my listenings history... :)

By the way what i speak about is new, because nobody or almost no one speak about active non electronic acoustical device controls( active or passive linked resonators connected to modified Schumann generator)...

:)

« There is sound in my ears even in a silent room...There is also a pair of ears in the sound wave body» -Groucho Marx

«This is only the blood waving, or silence listening to itself» -Harpo Marx

maghister said:  

And it is a myth to think that tonal accuracy can be separated complety from imaging..

I definitely agree with that. I've had my perception of image depth and  spaciousness explode just by tweaking equalizer settings. 

Thanks for that pointer tuberollin.
I tried what you did, moved my front sidewall 244's back about a foot, leaving the 1st wall reflection point slightly off to the front of the panel. I observed similar results, a little broadening of the soundstage side wise and a little more clarity. I will try it for awhile, see how I like it with most records, but with my go to test album I like it. It's like the little tiny bit of reflection I get from those two spots opened up the sound a tat but without making it overly bright.

I think the best answer is it depends on all the different factors that go into system/room interaction, so whatever sounds best is the right approach.  For me the answer was yes indeed, here's the whole story - 

My room treatment journey started with getting a package of Aurelex foam, the knobby kind, 2" thick, in 2' by 2' panels, which I attached to some simple cheap DIY wood stands, such that the foam was roughly at the same vertical position as I would put acoustic absorption panels.  I moved these around the room,listening and moving, and found that indeed the best sounding spots were at the 1st refection points and also almost exactly behind me, but about a foot apart.  I got GIK panels for the side refection points but left the stands behind my due to the closet behind them.  This was a very nice start in a series of improvements, which I guess actually began when I got rid of the coffee table in front of my listening chair (amateur mistake) and perfecting the speaker placement and toe-in (Cardas method).  At this point I had heavy curtains over the window on the front wall, and furniture in the front corners acting as diffusers.  I already had a heavy carpet, and wanted to also try the first reflection point on the ceiling but would have had to part with the ceiling fan, so that was a non-starter.  Then I decided to experiment with the front of the room, started by getting rid of the rack and put the gear on the floor and used simple thick pieces of wood and some cheap cones etc to decouple them from the floor.  That was a also a nice improvement, not as noticeable as the absorption on the sidewalls but still good.  Then I started to experiment with diffusion on the front wall bc that's what is recommended and looks pretty cool too.  At first this seemed pretty good but after living with it for a while, I decided to go back to the heavy curtains just to hear what would happen and WOW things sounded much better on the third part of this very long A-B-A test - clarity and tone and dynamics were all improved.  Curtains are staying.  I don't know why the diffusion originally sounded better, maybe it just sounded different and going back and forth was a real pain so I never bothered with quick A-B-A tests like I have done with other things. I imagine that like with gear I will continue to experiment, all part of the journey.  Somewhere in there I also changed my chair which I think can also make a big difference.

Btw my room is a bit of a tunnel (11.5'W x 20'L x 8.5'H) with front wall being 8.5'W, and I have box speakers with a reputation for brightness.  I'm sure those factors have a big influence on the impact of room treatments.

Curious if anyone has tried to use a good headphone setup as a reference for no room interaction, and treated their room until it sounds closest to the headphones?