First thing, take some time to read through the various forums here and you will learn a ton and can make a more informed opinion.
This forum (Studio building) is not lieterally designed for your question, it is for people physically building a studio, with 2 x4s, etc. While you are here though the "room treatment" question can be adressed.
Hoever muchyou spend on gear, if your room sounds bad, the recorded signal will sound bad. A big diff. between live and recording is the qualty of signal, and that you probabaly use a dynamic mic like an SM58 foir vocals live, where most start with a condenser for thier recording vocal mic. Condensers need phantom power, less gain, and pick up way more ambiant sound than dynamics (not necessarily better or worse, jsut different). if you put on headphones and throw up a nice condenser and just listen, you will hear crazy stuff usually. Insane pounding that turns out to be the cat walking in another room, fighter plane noise that turns out to be your fridge's compressor running, etc.
So room treatment can do a couple things, help provide some protection from all that noise (don't use the word soundproofing, you need to literally build from the ground up to get true soundproofing and there is a difference) and even more importantly usually, tuning the room for your recordings. You see, a rectangular bedroom is jsut about the worst acoustic space you can find. Sound waves travel in a manner that will bounce around a room like that in the worst way, and the wave will reenforce each other in some spots and cancel each other out in others. Ever hear a local news network throw a mic up in some high school gym town meeting or something and the sound of the person speaking is jsut grating to listen to with all the eching and reverb and horrible stuff going on? That is what you want to avoid to any degree in your room. You can diffuse the sound (spread out the reflections so they don;t build up between the parellel walls) or absorb (jsut grab it out of the air.
Look at it like this: if all you get is BAD reflections, you best bet is to isolate as much as posible and eliminate the reflections (you can always add reverb in after the fact in your software). That is the basic idea of a vocal booth, an isolated area where you can get the pure voice with no messy stuff.
ont he other hand, not too many opera halls have seperate vocal booths for each performer. These are descigned to have space that works in precise ratios, with walls that are not parellel and make for very falttering reflections.
If you clap in your room and hear a fast echo with a little flutter, you have reflection issues- this test only works for mid range frequencies, but is a good start. When you see pics of recording space you will see acoustic foam behind the monitors usually, this is to tame reflections from the back of these speakers from coming around and misleading the ear from waht is being monitored. A diffuser could be as simple as a bunch of books of different sizes on a bookshelf that bounce the sound around differntly, or a piece of fairly thin plywood bent in an arc (prefereable several, with different radii and different degrees of arc (think of the difference between a bell and a ball).
Everyone needs lots of bass absorption though. bass waves are long and then tend to bounce around the room until they start to line up along the diagnals where there is the most space. When they start to line up, they start to reinforce or cancel each other out and you get dead spots or boominess. The standard bass panel absorber is a 4 inch thick peice of owens corning rigid fiberglass that straddles the corners of your room from floor to ceiling.
diffuser stuff:
http://forum.studiotips.com/viewtopic.php?t=1851
corner absorber
http://forum.studiotips.com/viewtopic.php?t=534
Ignore all the technical stuff here and just check out the pics.
Your recordings will sound a lot better if your room doesnt; get in the way. But if youa re jsut doing vocals, you might want to stand int he closet, with all the slothes hanging there when tracking. The clothes will absorb that stuff like the fiberglass does, and you essentiall have your vocal booth.
Daav
