Ethan Winer is the smart guy to follow when it comes to room treatment. Recently he wrote something interesting about bass traps which I didn’t know:

Many people believe that adding bass traps to a room removes energy making low frequencies softer, which requires more power from the amplifiers and loudspeakers. But it’s easy to prove this is wrong. In most home-size rooms the main low frequency problem is deep nulls. So mixes you make sound boomy because you raise the bass to compensate for the lack of bass you hear due to nulls. Therefore, in most rooms adding bass traps gives the perception of more bass, not less.

When I read it, it made sense, but I had never thought about it that way. I always thought that bass traps would simply eat a bit of that low end boom just by add mass and absorption to the room.

You want the room to tread all frequencies in the same way, as flat sounding as you can. Which is impossible ’cause all rooms will color the sound. Monitors will color the sound too. Like your own ears. Your ears don’t have a flat range so you need to learn how to listen and being able to make judgments based on your monitors and the room you’re working in. You need to be a very experienced listener to be able to create great sound. Even when using shitty monitors in a non treated room. Listening is the hardest thing I guess.

For the full text of Ethan follow this link on Facebook.