Room Treatment Panel Placement Question

The conventional advise for positioning acoustic panels on a side wall seems to be to hang the panels on a wall at the position for which you could see your monitors in the reflection of a mirror hung on the wall at that location.  Makes perfect sense.
 
Now, consider an imaginary line between your monitor and the reflection point on the wall.  If your acoustic panel was held in a freestanding mount with only porous fabric on the front and back, would a position anywhere along that line be as effective as if the panel were hung on the wall?  In particular, would it be effective if it were quite close to the monitor itself?  Opinions, please.  Thanks.

what about the reflections that can now hit the wall because the panel is not there?  You're trying to damp certain surfaces (walls, floors, ceiling)  and stop the reflections from them. 

In theory... you could hang a panel in the center of the room and it would act like a sponge?   I don't think it works like that. If the room is large enough, I think you can absorb standing waves that way... like they try to do by hanging baffles from the ceilings of stadiums that also double as concert halls.... but IMO....that isn't very successful.

Moving the panel closer to the wall improves the absorber's effectiveness at lower frequencies, IOW it lengthens the longest wavelength that the panel will have a measurable effect on. The general rule of thumb is the distance between absorber and wall should be about the thickness of the absorber itself. Although a good starting point, my own experiments have shown that low-frequency attenuation is better when the absorber is twice that distance from the wall, although such placement is rarely practical.

Let me try to explain this a bit further.  I'm playing around with designing a DAW space in a room I'll be working into shape over the next year or so.  The good news:
 
1. The room is about 19 ft. by 12 ft.
2. The monitors will be far from any wall (albeit close to the middle of the room in both horizontal directions).
3. All of the walls have a lot of cabinets, shelves, doorways, alcoves, etc. that should provide a fair amount of random diffusion.
 
The bad:
 
The shelves, et.al. make panel placement near the walls all but impossible.
  
As I understand it (and I'm very much in learning mode), there are two issues one needs to deal with in room treatment: 1) standing waves for lower frequencies and 2) comb filtering for all (or maybe just higher?) frequencies.
 
I may be able to put bass traps in two of the corners and in several wall/ceiling junction locations, but the walls are pretty much not available for placing acoustic panels, except for directly behind the DAW desk.
 
Let me also add that I'm not going to be mixing in the way that most folks here do.  My interest is in synth-only music (no drums or drum machines competing for spectrum, and less bass than typical rock mixes).  I'm more interested in optimizing my capabilities to do synth sound design than getting mixes perfect.  As a result, I fear comb filtering more than standing waves.  Maybe this is foolishness due to inexperience ... I dunno.
 
In any case, I'll be custom building the desk and whatever other stands, etc. are required.  I was toying around with the idea of some kind of near-field acoustic enclosure that could mitigate the comb filtering issue ... possibly even reducing desktop reflections.  Crazy notion or something worth pursuing?  That's what I'm trying to figure out here.

tcm123


what's on the floor and what's on the ceiling?
a couple of clouds or three might help out since you can't put any absorbers on the walls.
definitely put in the bass traps. some is better than none.
the room dimensions are in your favor though

W-to-w carpet on floor.  Popcorn ceiling which may get removed and replaced with finish like conventional walls.  Haven't decided if the removal is worth the effort yet (but I really *hate* popcorn ceiling).
 
Clouds would be what ... 4"x4'x2' OC 703  (or is it OC 705)?  At least that much would be doable.