[cue Hank Hill's voice]Yes sir, Ah sure can talk a good game now, Ah tell ya what.[/Hank Hill]
Depends on the specifics of course, but in general I recommend diffusion of the early reflection zones, and absorption only as a last resort. My analogy is this: What would you do if this was a room for a grand piano? Would you turn it into a padded cell, or would you want to get your money's worth in terms of that deliciously rich sound field?
For a point source... well, I think it depends on what the radiation pattern is like. If it varies a lot, for instance such that there's excess off-axis energy going out into the room at the bottom end of the tweeter's range (usually 2-4 kHz ballpark), then we may have a problem. It's hard to selectively absorb the lower treble region without over-absorbing the upper treble region. It can probably be done, but I don't know how to do it.
The grand piano analogy applies even more to the MBLs than to the SoundLabs. Bass trapping may indeed be beneficial in many if not most cases, but we don't want to alter the spectral balance of the reverberant field by absorbing the high frequencies... and of course the shorter the wavelength, the more vulnerable to absorption it is.
Note that the smaller the room, the more effective a given amount of absorption is at altering (and potentially ruining) the in-room spectral balance. This is for two reasons: First, a square yard of absorptive material is a larger percentage of the room's surface area in a small room than in a large room. Second, because the reflection path lengths are shorter in a small room, (within a given time interval) more reflections will hit (and be killed by) our square yard of absorption in the small room.
I'm harping on absorption because many people's idea of room treatment is thick slabs of egg-crate foam stuck on the walls. Very few people go overboard on diffusion or bass trapping. Since having the good fortune to work with a real professional in this area (Jeff Hedback), I have gained a great deal of respect for the disproportionate benefits of using the right material in the right amount in the right place. It's sort of like crossover design - you can't just add capacitors at random and expect to improve things. It takes the right amount of inductance, capacitance, and sometimes resistance in the right places to get really oustanding results. And when room treatment is done right, your room literally sounds twice as big as its physical dimensions. I heard that in a recording studio that Jeff Hedback designed. (I also heard that my crossover design still had a problem, which had completely eluded me up until then!)
Ah tell ya what.
My small room with the near field setup sounded great until my son stole the recliner from the corner. Bass trap be Barco-Lounger.
Tim