There are surprising results though. A lot of which I have not covered in that article. The bit that I did with Clark's test is the start of that. Note that a reflector held vertically produced almost no effect whereas rotating it 90 degrees, it produced a negative result. This shows that floor/table/console reflections are bad indeed. Further research into that shows that it changes timbre but only if the reflection frequency is 500 Hz and up. This is very fortuitous since it means we can get rid of the floor reflections with pretty thin material such as thick carpet and padding. Imagine if we had to put 4 inches of fiberglass there!!!Amir, this is one area where I would join the subjectivists and say "trust your ears." Anechoic rooms sound bad, and they start sounding bad before they get to absolutely anechoic. Of course most of us don't get much of a chance to hear them, but there are a couple of reasonable substitutes -- have some stand mount speakers you are very familiar with? Take them outside and play them into an open space. Dry as unbuttered toast. Some in-ear monitors, with very flat FR just don't sound right either. Which is why, if you look at FR charts on headroom, for example, you'll see substantial amounts of "room gain" built into the very best headphones on the market. I love the confirmation all your good work provides, but I'm not surprised by the results. And it's good news for people who don't want to live in domestic spaces that look like studio control rooms.
Tim
Here is a useful graph from Clark paper:
The top three shows the Impulse Response of three of the scenarios. As we see, the response is nearly identical. There is the initial impulse followed by another strong "reflection." The two graphs on the bottom right show what each ear is hearing. We notice that the frequency is different since the distance to the reflection changes depending on which ear is closer to it (the graph to the bottom left shows them overlaid with one of them boosted artificially). This difference causes the brain to tune out a lot of the notches in the comb filter.