Need advice; can't raise ceiling much

[Don Richard]

Cooper's contention that delaying sound by 35 milliseconds makes the brain think that the sound is a separate event, that gets chalked up to reverberation/echo, rather than the original sound. A 35 millisecond extra delay of the ceiling reflection could be achieved by adding 48 inches, unless I've miscalculated .... so adding 2 feet extra distance to the journey of the sound from the tweeter on the way up to the ceiling, and 2 feet more down to a listener's ears might make the reflection seem more like "room" than "source," and that extra 35 milliseconds

What one should try to do, vis-a vis early reflections, is to cause the earliest reflection from the reproduction system to arrive later than the reflections picked up by the microphone(s) during the recording process. This will allow the floor bounce and ambience picked up by the studio mics to be heard and not be masked and/or "precedented" by the reproduction system's earlier reflections. This was the basis for Live End, Dead End (LEDE) and Reflection Free Zone (RFZ) studio control room design. Russ Berger, for one, was instrumental, no pun intended, in these solutions for better studio monitoring. Basically, the end of the room with the speakers is deadened and the rear of the room is diffused.

Loudspeakers that have better pattern control in the mids and highs (horns) will excite fewer early reflections than more omnidirectional designs (dome tweeters). You should need fewer room treatments with horn-loaded designs.