How to deal with room treatment
How To...
This observation comes from over three decades of experience and hundreds (if not thousands) of successful critical installations.
You definitely want to address the first horizontal reflection from each front speaker. I'm assuming that in most installations that there is a nearby wall or other object(s) that can reflect sound from the side of your speaker. It's not so much for correction of tonal balance (although it may be required if your speakers have uneven frequency response off axis), but it's mostly to prevent smearing of the sound. The slightly late arrival of reflected sound will muddy your overall sound and affect your imaging.
Think of a stone dropped into a pool. The waves are like sound waves. If you drop a stone simultaneously near the edge of the pool, those waves will merge with and affect the original waves.
Some audiophiles are surprised to find that with proper room treatments, including absorption, recorded reverberation will be increased, not diminished! For example, the sound of a choir singing a cappella in a large space will sound more spacious when you absorb the unwanted speaker/room reflections than it would if played in a live room without treatment. That's because unwanted room reflections are smearing and even covering the sound of the subtleties of recorded ambience, spaciousness, and acoustic delay.
(1) The side walls where the sound reflects from the speaker and then arrives at your ear.
(2) The area behind the listening seat.
(3) As many corners as possible.
If you determine that a secondary reflection from the other speaker is capable of reflecting at your seat, I'd consider addressing it as well.
There are two other places where room treatments can help, but they may not be WAF friendly:
(1) The first reflection on the ceiling from each speaker to your ear.
(2) If you have bare floors, the first reflection on the floor from each speaker to your ear. Of course, carpet or area rugs can take care of the floor bounce issue in the mid and high frequencies.
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