Is a 12' X 16' room big enough for stereo?

My room is just over 12' x 18' x 8'. My 3-way speakers are Aerial 10Ts and I also have a Triad Platinum subwoofer to reproduce the lowest octave or two. The speaker fronts are just over 5 ft. out from the back wall at one long end of the room and woofer centers are about 3 ft from either side wall.

Soundstaging is quite nice and overall the sound is fantastic. I've had much lesser equipment in this room in the past and it still sounded quite good.

Some to many will tell you that a room's acoustics is about 80% of the quality of the sound you hear. I believe that is quite true. All walls of the room are real wormwood paneling with tongue and groove joinery and recesses about every 6 inches. The ceiling has 3 beams going left to right (from staring at the speakers) and the floor is wall to wall berber carpeting with thick padding with wooden floor joists and a crawl space under that part of the house.

Also, there is a fireplace and very few windows with built-in bookcases behind either speaker. Luck of the draw it is a wonderfully acoustic room. Not too live nor too dead.

I would make certain that most/all reflective sounds can be absorbed/deflected or minimized and speaker quality and placement will be critical as it always should be.

I'd also second the opinion for a higher ceiling. Plus the extra headroom makes you feel less confined thereby improving your ability to relax.

I'm in an appartment 12 X 15 w/Thiel 2.3's and x-150 and x-2. Thiels are 36" from the rear wall and 24" from the side. I placed the thiels along the 12' wall. listing position 4 ft from the rear wall. slight tow-in. ppppppppeeerrrrrrffffffeeeeeeeecccccccttttttt!!!!!!!!!!

It's proabably built by now, but here goes: a minimum nine foot ceiling would be nice. Two more feet in width would allow more room between the speakers and, more importantly, between each speaker and the side wall. If you could go to twenty-five or twenty-six in length you would have room to grow and would allow for the deepest bass to be reproduced should you go for a subwoofer or a speaker sytem with really deep bass. As it is, the room is a good size. The trick now is to not fill it up with too much furniture and to fine tune the acoustics if you can. At the building stage a number of things, insofar as materials and construction techniques used should be looked at, since they can't be retrofitted very easily. The rest is fine tuning the acoustics with the usual approaches. The fact that you are looking at the interaction between speakers and room is a good idea, but you should, budget permitting, plan ahead for future upgrades of the speakers.

Lots of good advice here. You should have a great time experimenting and tuning. My room is only 14 x 16 and is a challenge with my big speakers. Argent room lenses were just too big for the livability factor (and too expensive--Yowee!!) but some Sonex at the first reflection points and on the back wall between the speakers helped hugely, as did a nice thick rug.