Yes, I think aiming for the sound of a good mastering room is a very good idea.   But I don’t think you need to worry that you will optimize for specific recordings produced in a specific room.   Good mastering rooms, in general, are going to be far more consistent and predictable from room to room than typical domestic rooms.   In fact, conformity is considered a very good thing in mastering and control rooms.  

Engineers often need to travel between studios for their work.   It’s just a fact of the business.  For example, we have a customer who is a very prominent record producer.   He has a gorgeous studio of his own.   But he’s about to work on the soundtrack of a major Hollywood feature film.   Therefore, he will be spending a couple of months in a studio in LA, because that’s where the film makers reside.   And they want all the action happening within their reach.  

So conformity and predictability are important factors in what defines a good room.   If you can manage to get your home listening room anywhere within this camp, then you will have gone very far towards best hearing what  the record producers have intended.  

Btw, a typical mixing or mastering room will shoot for a diffuse sound field and a reverberation time in the range of 0.2- 0.4 seconds.  Fairly dead.   Also much easier said than done, especially the “diffuse sound field” part of the equation.    But there you are.  

Cheers,

Thomas

Thomas Barefoot, President/CTO, Barefoot Sound (manufacturer)

 I would focus your attention on the "style" changes that have permeated the professional recording industry in its quest for a good listening environment for two channel stereo.  In the late 1960s-1970s the idea was that "precision listening" required a totally dead room.  But then the industry noticed that the mids and treble were dead but the walls of the rooms were allowing bass to still reverberate to Tsunami levels on crescendos.  Thus your recording playback was not specifically too good, and neither was the brown acid at Woodstock, haha.    So this went out of style to be replaced by:

"Live End-Dead End."  Here the front was still a "precision soundfield" and heavily overdamped  but the rest of the room was left pretty "live" so as to allow for dynamic bloom on crescendos.  Until the industry noticed that the mids were now dead, the treble was primarily beaming and the bass was, as usual, still reverberating to Tsunami levels on crescendos.  There also was brown acid, but not so much.  Which leads us to today:

Even frequency response by proper room design, unobstructed access to the frontal soundfield  (get all the junk away from the monitors), treatment of reverberant space only as needed and look for smooth clear definition.  Ahhh.  That's the ticket.  Get rid of the bass Tsunami through mapping of the modes and nodes of the room (speaker placement as "king")  and precise equalization of the frequencies at the lowest end using notch filtering etc , while trying to avoid over processing of the analog "bloom."

In this camp you will find Bob Ludwig at Gateway, Bob Katz at Digital Domain and Doug Sax at The Mastering Lab.  Go look at pictures of their mastering rooms where they are striving for a truly balanced clear picture of the finished mix.  These are the "audiophile certified" guys in the recording industry.  And all three have terrific things to say about what works best when it comes to reflection.

Bob Katz has a great book out that really should be on your bookshelf right next to "get better sound" by Jim Smith and other real "guys" in this business.  It is aimed at mastering engineers but that's basically what some of us audiophiles really wish we were, to a certain extent, haha.

Some of the technical jargon will be like Greek but as Bob says:  Let my book sit there in between readings.  Let it jell a little bit at a time.

I really like that the general direction of Bob's advice is to just dive in and first work on your room so you have a great "laboratory" to bring your ideas about equipment into.  While he has to have specific equipment to be used fixing recordings it is specifically not brown and specifically not too bad.  You might even laugh at how primative looking his current mastering room looks.  "It ain't pretty looking---it's pretty sounding."

Just my two cents.  Let the tomatoes begin.  If you want to experiment and just do half, that's up to you...