Thanks for the response Jason. I will be moving from Taiwan in another year, so the idea of spending a lot of money on bass traps doesn't make sense because they will be expensive to ship back home.
I see you are involved in professional acoustics which means that you are very knowledgeable so I believe what you are saying. However, I also wonder what are the
actual chances it will make my room worse? While it could screw up my room, couldn't anything else from desks to cabinets to consoles? If I put some foam in the back, behind the books then it shouldn't mess with my reverb times, should it? Also I can vary the books, big, small, big, medium, etc. then wouldn't it be similar to small blocks of wood in those diffusers. Of course, no pro-studio would even need to think about these kinds of things, but with real estate and rental prices where they are, I doubt I will have a big studio room when I get back to Canada either, and my stuff must go somewhere. I was taking a look at a book about Feng Shui (Chinese art of arrangement) and they had a picture of an office with bad Feng Shui, then a picture of the office remodeled and it did look much better, but I noticed all the filing cabinets and the copy machines were now gone in the after picture. Sometimes the acoustician's answers to these questions can be like the Feng Shui master's. I now have two ECM 8000 test microphones so I guess I will just have to learn how to test the acoustics and do before and after tests.
Also, what do you think about the Chinese wood screens as diffusers? I could put them in front of foam to reflect sound out in a scattered way. Where I am now, they are far cheaper than buying a professionally made acoustic diffuser and far more beautiful and worthy of shipping back to Canada. Many of them have hardly any straight angles like these...
