ah, so that set-up (in panels 2'x4') would help make my room not acoustically dead but ,erm... acoustically not dead yet? lol
Make sure you don't confuse the concept of absorbing first reflections with the concept of deadening the room.
Stopping a first reflection reduces the confusion your ears have when they can't locate the source (your speaker) easily. You don't really need to worry about doing this in low frequencies because we get most of our information on location in ranges where the wavelengths are smaller than our heads (~1 kHz and up). "First reflections" are sounds that only bounce once before reaching our ears. They get there soon enough that our ear can't separate them from the original sound, so the true direction of the sound's origin becomes unclear. We address this by placing absorbers at the places where a sound can leave a speaker, bounce once, and arrive at your ear.
Any given sound wave will bounce around your room a bunch of times, passing by your ear on some of its trips. This is the "live" or reverberant effect and it can be a good thing, as it can reinforce the original sound, making it sound stronger. But as a sound is "stretched out" in this way you lose clarity, as notes and instruments overlap more.
Absorbers placed around your room reduce the amplitude of sound waves as they bounce, making them die off quicker. Where you put them is important but not critical, as sound travels very quickly and each wave will make a lot of reflections in different places before it dies off. We like to put absorbers meant to attack bass frequencies in corners because bass notes do more of a "sloshing" around the room, as their wavelengths are large with respect to a room's dimensions. Corners are places where 2 (or 3) boundaries meet, meaning you can affect reflections in multiple directions simultaneously.
How live or dead you want your room is a matter of personal preference. Some people like live rooms because they feel surrounded by the music. Others, like me, like dead rooms because of the increased clarity and separation between instruments.
