setting up a listening room in unfinished basement

Try this site www.decware.com/paper36.htm for info on room setup.

Rives Audio, F. Alton Everest and Jon Risch's DIY acoustic treatments ought to get you started with good info.

Be careful when trying to build / treat a room. It is possible to use materials that are non-linear across the frequency range. As such, it is possible to create more problems than what you started off with. This could be due to introducing materials that absorb / damp some specific frequencies while increasing reflections in other frequency ranges, etc... While "non-linear absorption" CAN be a "good thing" if properly applied, even some "audiophile approved" products do this without making you aware of it. Spend the money on at least one of Everest's books and read / learn what you can on the web and you'll end up dollars and hours ahead in the long run. Sean
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Sean's advice is the best, although I have not visited the Rives Audio site. Hopefully it does not give out simple math answers, like the Cardas room ratios, as those are not sufficient to create a good room.

F. Alton Everest's book "The Master Handbook of Acoustics" is available from Old Colony Sound Labs and from PartsExpress.com. Also, Don Davis is a fine author. Both are in the reference section of any public library. Everest is the most comprehensive.

He shows you how to evaluate the room and how to build the right acoustic control devices, and select how the drywall is mounted, isolate the outside world, and vice versa.

Acoustics is easy to understand- just a fair amount to read/learn. Most professed acoustics designers have never tried to understand all of what is in the Everest book: like guys who got through school never really doing the homework for themselves, but just talk the talk. Read- you'll see. If they knew, then that book-knowledge would be readily apparent in their literature, showing you a much more profound way, like Sean indicates, to understand and control room acoustics.

Good luck!

Roy Johnson
Green Mountain Audio

I'm sure you need to do some accoustic treatment of the concrete space, but, before you do so, set up the audio gear and play some dixieland jazz. If you have an old horn midrange/tweeter speaker so much the better. I did this once upon a time, and was absolutely astonished. At the time I lived in NY city, and hung out in jazz dives, so I knew how it was supposed to sound.