But, as we go lower down the spectrum and start reaching the point where sound waves are no longer acting like rays then surely trying to deflect them is futile? Even if your angled walls are dense enough to deflect low frequency the waves are going to bounce off in a large, smudgy mess, a bit like ever-growing ripples in water from a stone's throw causing a fog of phasey low frequency sound to hit your ears?
That's why we build soffits and put the speakers INSIDE them!

And it accomplishes exactly the reverse of what you are suggesting: it tightens the bass into clean, crisp, even, smooth coverage... It ELIMINATES the fog that would be present otherwise, from just having speakers out in the room
It's not so much about the density of the baffles, but rather about the SIZE of the baffles. The effect you speaker of, where higher frequencies act more like rays and lower frequencies spread out all over in a sphere, is not due to the actual frequency, but rather due to the wavelength of the frequency as compared to the size of the object that produced it. Waves that are smaller than the front baffle of the speaker are projected forward, because the baffle itself blocks them from going anywhere else. There's a rule of thumb in acoustics, that says that waves are not affected by objects that are smaller than the wavelength, but they ARE affected by objects that are larger then the wavelength. We use this principle on tuning the reflective surfaces in rooms, but it also applies to speakers. Waves produced by the speaker that have a wavelength larger than the smallest dimension of the speaker baffle, WILL wrap around behind the speaker, but waves that are smaller will not.
So what if we put a much bigger baffle on the speaker? Well, that would move the "change over" frequency down the scale. That larger baffle would force waves of a lower frequency to go forward into the room, because it blocks the from going backwards. And if we put a REALLY large baffle on there? Then you could keep ALL of the waves going forward, and not allow ANY of them to go backward. If you do that, it is called a "soffit"...

Actually, it's called an "infinite baffle", and it would have to be very large, depending on how low the speaker goes. If the speaker produces sound down to 100 Hz, then a baffle 11 feet wide would keep all the sound going out, stopping it all from going back. But if the speaker goes down to 30 Hz, then the baffle would have to be 38 feet wide. Putting a 38 foot wide baffle on each speaker is going to be a bit difficult in a small room!
On the other hand, if you made the left baffle blend into the left wall, and into the front wall, and into the right baffle, which also blends into the right wall... then you have one hell of a baffle! Adding in the side walls as well, it actually is feasible to get a very wide baffle, even in a small room.... if you do it right. There are some tricks that can help, too. Such a wall would, in fact, keep all of the frequencies in the room, projected forward. And since the speaker itself is INSIDE the wall with just the face coming through to be flush, then any sound that DOES happen to go backwards inside the soffit... well, it just stays inside the soffit! It can't get out, so it stays there and dies.
So even if you can only make your baffle a few feet wide, you can get a drastic improvement in the low end: it gets very tight, very even, very smooth. Here's an example of such a room, and you can see the bass results for yourself, in the graphs from the acoustic analysis:
thread about Studio Three Productions' control room. Here's another one that is currently under construction,
thread about Steve's high-end control room in New Orleans, and there's some comments in there by the owner, regarding how he was blown away by the bass clarity... and the room isn't even finished yet!
Both of those have soffit-mounted speakers, and both are based on the RFZ design principle. You can see that it works.
And in reality, depending on construction, I suspect the lowest of lows are going to either go straight through your walls and carry on out into the outside world, or a certain amount will be attenuated, and some will be slowed down and then reflected back in to the room after being delayed etc.
Nope! Not if you build your walls and soffits correctly!
1. What is the frequency range we need to be concerned with when trying to deflect early reflections in a reflection free zone?
All of it!

However, human hearing starts losing its directional sense in the very low frequencies, so it isn't really necessary to build walls 50 feet wide and high, to reflect the entire spectrum. The general recommendation is that the width of the baffle should be at least three times the diameter of your low frequency driver. In other words, if you have a speaker with an 8" woofer, then you want the soffit baffle to be at least 24" (60cm) wide. Wider is better.
Consider that if the cabinet of your speaker is 10 inches wide, then frequencies below about 1,350 Hz are already able to wrap around, since the wavelength of 1,350 is 10 inches: anything lower than that can potentially wrap around behind it. But if your baffle is 4 feet wide, then you drop that drastically to 280 Hz: everything about 280 Hz has a wavelength that is too short to wrap around the baffle.... That's a huge jump!
In theory, if you have the frequency dispersion charts/data of your monitors then you can work out the angle of that cut off frequency which will enable you to accurately work out what angle(s) are required for your RFZ, in order to meet the standard (if there is such a thing)
To a certain extent, yes... sort of.... But it's better to assume that you just need to make the baffle as wide as you possibly can, so it goes as low as possible... hence, blending the soffits and walls together, into one huge baffle... It is quite feasible that, in a well designed RFZ room, the baffle can appear (from the speaker's point of view) to be 20 feet wide... thus covering down to 56 Hz... but even then below that, the wave still cannot wrap around behind the soffit, because there is no place for it to get in! It's all one solid surface.
2. Would it not be better to have a RFZ which is capable of reflecting the ray like frequencies but at the same time attempting to absorb the rest?
Why? If the baffle is big enough, then ALL the frequencies are "ray like" to a certain extent!
One method for testing the response of speakers is to bury them in the ground outside, facing up towards the sky, so that the really do have an "infinite baffle" around them: dozens of feet in any direction. All of the sound goes out into the hemisphere in front of the speaker. None of it goes behind, because Planet Earth gets in the way....
OK, I'm simplifying and exaggerating a little: Yes, lower frequencies do still tend to spread out across the baffle, while higher frequencies do still project out more like waves.... But the point of an RFZ design is to keep ALL the direct sound heading towards your head alone, at all frequencies you can manage, and any sound that would have been reflected off the side walls pack to your head should instead be reflected towards the rear wall, where it can be attenuated and diffused, before eventually arriving at your ears again, as a more or less diffuse field.
I know that is how a lot of people seem to design their RFZ on here, but it seems that the trademarked RFZ concept does not... it relies purely on hard rigid geometry at the front, with absorption and diffusion at the rear.
If the front end of the room does not reflect sound around the mix position to the rear for absorption and diffusion, then it isn't true RFZ! Because that's what RFZ means! You can't realistically create an RFZ by using absorption alone: You can only do it by angling surfaces appropriately at the front of the room, such that all reflections go past the mix position to the rear side walls and rear wall, where they are reduced in intensity, delayed, and hopefully diffused as well, if possible. That's what RFZ is. Take a look at those two threads that I linked you to: those are both variations on the RFZ concept. Both have hard, solid, rigid surfaces at the front of the room, angled to direct reflections away from the mix position.
Most of John's studios are RFZ based. Most of mine are too. Why? Because it works! Once you experience the results of a properly implemented RFZ room, you'll appreciate just how well it works.
- Stuart -