Have you treated your listening space?

Geoffkait...I assume you're joking.

I've treated rooms I've used for home recording studios for years, and worked in pro studios ad nauseum. That said, I'm firmly in the "no treatment needed in the hifi room" group...I like the ambient sound of a "living space" room, and find all I need to do is own normal furniture and move speakers around a little. My system sounds great, has standing waves here and there but not in my listening spot, and the bass is tuned by careful listening to a REL sub. When I record stuff and put it on in the "untreated" space, I hear it differently and that's a good thing.

Headphones...get some headphones...wait...what about "head treatment"? I found that taping sponges and doll house mattresses to my head makes headphones sound better.

In the 70's I covered a small basement room with mattresses so my band could rehearse without bothering neighbors. It worked very well, so duct taping doll house mattresses to my head just seems like an obvious sound absorbtion solution. That bad news is all the hair I lose when removing the tape.

Note that many respected gear reviewers don't "treat" their rooms with anything beyond furniture, rugs, and bookcases, although they go to great lengths to tweek things like speaker placement and isolation of components...maybe this is because they want the "real world" environment of the sound of the room. If you want to turn a living space into an anachoic chamber I suppose that's fine as nobody will hear you when you shoot yourself in the foot. I really do think the answer to the "treatment obsessed" is to use good headphones while sitting on a subwoofer.

Treatment schmeatment. El redundo amundo. Case by case I say, and I think bass traps should look like faux marble Roman columns...right? And it's "anachoic" not "anecolic" which actually (if spelled correctly) is the art of soundproofing a grumpy baby. Strange but true.

Damn...anechoic it is! Also, I tried to speak to Jeff Hedback once and his voice was so muffled with so little siblance or bass impact I couldn't understand a thing.

Another idea is coat your ears and face with foam insulation.