[Ethan Winer]

More thoughts on this:

There are educated listeners and uneducated listeners. Often I hear from what I consider uneducated listeners that they prefer the sound of their room rather than a treated room. To me this is related to the conventional wisdom that a 2-channel room should be more live sounding than a home theater. I happen to disagree with that - most movies have music, and that music should sound as the mix engineers intended. If absorption in a home theater improves imaging, then it does the same for a 2-channel setup. So I guess you could say a well-treated room can be an acquired taste. In my experience small room ambience is always bad ambience. Versus a room large enough to have true reverb. But then we're outside the realm of home listening environments.

I work with many professional recording and mastering engineers, and I consider them to be educated listeners. These people listen to music for a living, and if they can't hear clearly how the music really sounds, without being influenced by the sound of their own room, they can't do their job. From my perspective, the listener at home should aim to hear the same quality as the engineer heard when mixing. And that means not leaving early reflections untreated.

Of course, there's no accounting for taste, and it's not my job to tell someone what they should or should not prefer and enjoy. All I can do is address the science of audio, and from that perspective it's clear (to me, anyway) that comb filtering due to early refections is best avoided.

--Ethan