SQ lacking

You’ve got a lot of equipment there and it looks like good quality gear, so if your system just sounds bad, something isn’t working properly.

I can’t really tell you what the optimal setup would be, but I would set up each part of your system (i.e. cd, lp and headphone) one at a time, as simply as possible. Your cd spinner to your preamp/dac to your amp to your speakers only, in order to try and isolate any piece of gear that might be causing a problem or, in another way, finding out which components are working correctly. In setting up your headphone system, just go from cd spinner to headphone amp/dac to headphones. Leave the preamp/dac out.

Try that and see what happens and let us know if it helps.  You can eventually get everything hooked up together, but with all those connections and components it's easy to get something hooked up wrong when you're connecting it all up at once.

How big is your bedroom? You don’t have those speakers on each side of your bed do you? You're going to have to clear out some room for your speakers to work.  I don't think room correction will be much help until you get some open space between you and the speakers.

Tomcy6....the speakers don't sound bad, in fact they sound "good" to me but not WOW. Maybe it's the room? For the speakers, the chain for cd is cd-dac-preamp-Dspeaker room correction (haven't calibrated yet)-power amp-speakers. On the headphones, if I go from cd directly to headphone amp/dac then I don't think I can use any other source for headphones unless I switch interconnects...what a pain. But I could take the preamp out of the chain. The headphones are the worst experience so far...though I haven't listened to any of my other headphones other than the Sennheiser so far.

The bedroom is a standard bedroom, not the master. Maybe 12' x 14' is a decent guess. Clutter everywhere...bed in middle, bookshelves, desk of drawers, etc. The only place for speakers is in opposing corners in room on each end of bookcases, which places them in small corners of the room...inbetween the wall and end of bookcase. No room to bring out from wall (bed in way) more than maybe 1 foot. In one corner, after bringing speaker maybe 10 inches from wall the front of the speaker is only a foot or so from the bed. It's bad. However, trying to do the best I can

Tomcy6...I am thinking you are undoubtedly right regarding the effects of the room for the speakers. That is probably it. I am, however, quite perplexed about my Sennheiser headphones. I would think with this equipment, I should be experiencing something musically quite pleasurable. But again, I haven't taken the preamp out of the equation yet. There isn't much to consider, am I right, when it comes to the headphones. Either they play well or not I suppose. Other than possibly the preamp, I think I have it hooked up correctly