Absolutely, all things being equal of course.
The following video will answer the question in a more detailed way:
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" There is no such thing as too much absorption "
The number one misconception related to acoustic treatment is the following:
“Too much absorption will make my room sound dead”.
This is utterly wrong.
So from where does this misconception come from?
Why do some rooms sound dead, after adding some acoustic treatment?
The short answer is: uneven decay time (or reverb time).
This is due to wrong acoustic treatment, like using foam panels only, or curtains only, or rugs only, or a combination of them. Those “treatments” will absorb mids and highs only, leaving the low end untamed. This will then result in a dead sounding room.
A Jesco’s video explaining the above very clearly with nice plots.
Worth the 3 minutes :
–> https://youtu.be/ZzkdJaLN-LA
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Oh yes !
Basically been playing with positioning and quantity of the Monsters and TriTraps on both my front and rear wall. Also tried a bit of homebrewed diffusion on rear window.
Conclusions were…
1 - I don’t like diffusion , basically the same as my previous trial.
2- All current room treatment is optimal. Removing anything causes a definite degradation.
3- The untreated centre portion of both front and rear windows are causing big problems. Just by temporarily placing one TriTrap in the centre of both windows , i gain even better bass detail , a more open sound [just what i was looking for] and cleaner top end. I had previously noticed on some strong female vocals a tendency for them to sound strained. Not enough to worry about , but with the centre window treated that has completely disappeared, making vocal definition much easier.
So looks like another couple of Monsters are needed. Only downside is having to move them for the view during the day. But i can live with that.
Interestingly i was only yesterday re-reading some articles on sound treatment , including the one Thomas shows above , which i can fully agree with.
I also did a calculation and with 22 panels i will have 27% wall coverage .
The room is not at all dead sounding , which i admit is something i was worried about ending up with.
Diffusion, can be tricky. We need a certain distance between the listener and diffusion system. Based on my readings 1,5 - 2 meters is a minimum.
Interestingly I wasn’t able to find any solid information regarding that distance.
That’s a good ratio!
For those who have taken room measurements using REW have many used tuned bass traps to reduce certain frequency peaks or just broad band traps?
The room “sounding dead”, sometimes simply means “sounding different” or more precisely “sounding unexpected”.
One expects a small room to “sound” like a small, meaning what we see should match what we hear.
We don’t expect a small room to “sound” like if we were outdoors.
When being in a small room our brain expects strong reflexions (what we hear should match what we see).
I suspect that could be the one reason for the “sounding dead” feeling.
Psychoacoustics is a fascinating topic! 
The “sound environment” we experience when being in a library is ok (very large rooms).
The very same “sound environment” could feel wrong/strange in a small room (our listening rooms).
Psychoacoustics! Interesting, isn’t it? 
Tuning a bass traps is… very difficult…
Let’s say you have a problem at 75Hz-80Hz.
You’ll build your bass trap with care, but miss the target by +/-5Hz.
You keep your problem and add a new one: absorbing at 70Hz only (creating a dip).
Don’t focus on a specific frequency. Target large frequency ranges (starting with the low end). And your brain likes it better that way.
GIK Acoustics offers that kind a products: Monster Bass Traps with “FlexRange Technology”. And they make them to your dimensions and even to a certain frequency range.
I bought 4 of these with nice results. I have a total of 19 bass traps installed.
Nota : don’t be afraid by your measurements. They usually look awful 
There is no such thing as a room with a really flat frequency response 
Thanks Thomas, as yet I haven’t gone down the route of taking measurements for a couple of reasons. Firstly I am trying to read up on the subject and make some sense of it. It does seem quite daunting. Once done I am hoping some clever people at GIK will help me out. Secondly there have been a few changes of late to my listening room. Moving system to a new location (retrospectively I’m not sure this has been beneficial as I read more on the subject but the room is a difficult shape) Secondly new speakers and speaker cable. Thirdly I am waiting for a couple of new sofas. Amazing the difference a completely empty room has on the acoustics. Obviously my previous sofa was absorbing some bass frequencies.
I have been getting a bee in my bonnet that my room and speaker position are not symmetrical and trying to figure out if room treatment can compensate for this. The biggest difficulty in my room is treating first reflection points with the lack of symmetry.
I take comfort from the system pics thread and the majority of rooms are also not ideal shapes and sizes and there are many happy listeners.
Can Bass Traps Take Away Too Much Bass?
Jesco answers that question, and some others, in a very clear and pedagogical way.
Really worth the 10 minutes 
Interesting. In this respect is it really necessary to perform room analysis? For some minimal room treatment would simple treating corners and back wall with flex range bass traps and first reflection points with a little absorbtion/diffusion? Maybe some front wall diffusion?
I have not been following this thread but I watched a video on youtube a couple of weeks ago that told me this so I purchased two GIK tri traps for the bass and two 242 panels for first reflections to see what happened.
The 242 panels have been a great success although I found that a heavy curtain was doing a pretty good job on the reflection from my left speaker so moved that panel to the rear wall behind my sofa. The sofa is around 1m from the wall and my imaging has now improved by quite a margin.
The tri traps which I had in the corners nearest the speakers were a failure as they made the sound quite a bit duller and less lively. It took me ages to arrange everything to get them in place and I expected an improvement but after many hours of listening I had to take them back out due to my new duller and less real sound.
I’ve been using REW for around a month and to my surprise there was not a massive diffference between my response curves with or without the treatment, I was struggling to decide which curve looked better as both had pros and cons. REW has helped greatly with setting up my subwoofer crossover point and phase settings though.
I previously knew from listening that there was a large null in my room but after measuring I’ve found that I’m around -20db from around 55 to 70hz and have no idea how to fix it. The only way to improve it a bit is to have my speakers quite close to the side walls and my sofa closer to the back wall but this has a detrimental effect on everything else apart from the bass.
So in my room and for me “There is such a thing as too much absorbtion”. I may well have tried the wrong type of absorbtion but my system sounds better to me with no tri traps in the room.
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When i hear people say a room sounds dead , my belief is they mean the top end is very dull /sat on.
My room was designed/built/setup to purposefully not look/feel like a typical living room.
If the room is treated correctly and with the right music [usually well recorded live concerts], the room can feel much larger, eg a small club, large concert hall, or open air event even.
Then with the correct or specifically lack of certain visual clues the effect is reinforced, thereby fooling the brain into believing your in a different location.
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No, you don’t need to make measurements. It helps, but it’s not crucial.
REW is a very nice software, but being able to read/interpret those measurements isn’t trivial. One needs some understanding of certain concepts in order to “read” those graphs.
Depending on your room and the distance at the first reflexion points, I wouldn’t use diffusion (you need ~2 meters between the diffuser and your ears). Good/efficient diffusers are expensive…
I’d go for Monster Bass Traps everywhere. Use the Flex Range for the front wall and Full Range for the back wall as well as first reflexion points. The thicker they are the better.
You can’t fix it, unfortunately. As you said, the only way to get around that problem is listening position first, then speakers positioning. Just like you did.
This depends what you mean by massive, +/- 5dB is very much significant !
Remember, we’re talking about logarithmic based plots.
Out of interest, I actually had another null around 110hz and to my surprise was able to cure this by plugging my speaker ports with foam bungs that are slightly vented. My port is tuned much lower than this but somehow it was having an effect higher up the frequency range.
The bungs didn’t effect my other null which at first I thought had something to do with the drivers in my speakers rolling off. I’ve since proved that is not the issue as there is no change to my null even when crossing my sub over much higher at 80hz.
Can I ask did the tri traps have flex range or scatter plates? When you say less lively is this in the bass or mids and upper frequencies?
I fully agree if using surround sound, but I think that with plain stereo the room can be over-absorbent - the extreme example being an anechoic chamber, in which the sound will be unnatural because there will be no sound at all from sides, rear or above, and very uncomfortable when the music stops. It is of course rather academic as no domestic room is likely to be capable of getting even close to an anechoic chamber - I’m simply challenging the absolute implication of ‘utterly wrong”.
As I quoted on 4th Jan (post 155), the best sound I have heard, ever, from a hifi system was with an earlier system playing in largely open space outdoors - negligible room refection (but some, e.g. house wall some distance behind, hedges at side), and ambient noise from sides and above). So to my mind getting as close to a wall-less (and ceiling-less) effect is good, but not a completely dead effect. For that you can’t have complete absorption, and some degree of non-focussed background is necessary, as you might get from an absorber with scatter plate, or some absorbers and varied wall/furniture surfaces.
Some people of course like the sound of added reflections, while I suspect that many people are so used to it that it sounds right, even though the refkections may muddle the sound.
They were the standard traps with no scatter plates or flex range. It’s hard to describe what I mean by less lively but things like kick drums were a bit duller sounding with less whack and not as well defined which made them sound less real to me. This is actually the opposite of what I was expecting.
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Could it have been that they were too broadband in absorbtion? Kick drum frequency apparently is 40-100Hz which is where tritrap absorbtion is quite high if you look on GIK website.