Is my room doomed? Pic

Enzo,

did you hear the Gryphon/Rockport combo with a tube pre-amp prior?

That particular SS amp with a tube pre-amp is suspect for me along with the room due to its relatively low input impedance in combo with a tube pre-amp. An impedance mismatch between SS amp and tube pre-amp might account for some of what you describe you are not hearing that you did prior if SS pre-amps were what you had heard prior, regardless of the quality of the individual units.

After you try 11flat6 advice, if i doesn't help I'd agree that omnis are the way to go. You might only reach an 8.75 of your dealer perfection of 10 - but you'll never reach 10 with the room as it is now. 10's are only for treated rooms in my opinion.

Still with Dueval or MBL (only omnis I've heard recently) you can be glued to your seat and be really satisfied with music (which is what we like to pretend it's all about, right). I grant you that it's hard to change direction if you feel that Nirvana could be yours after all your work to build this system; but you've got a mega-system in a compromised setting, so it might be better to recognize that doing justice to the room is more important for satisfaction than putting together good equipment. Particularly since you are working at an extremely high level of equipment matching and it's not making you happy.

Mapman, no I heard it with the Gryphon Mirage or the Gryphon Sonata Allegro preamp. I have borrowed the Mirage in my system before. The Wavac is actually not in my system right now but I'm borrowing an Orpheus Two to get by. I can't say 100% it's not the preamp causing this, but with the borrowed Mirage unit it's better but still far away from what I heard at 2 rooms with almost identical equipment.

Anyway you are right I should eliminate the preamp as a main reason for the sound. However I have been down this route before, ie buying equipment to eliminate variables.

Previously I had Gamut L5 speakers mated with the ML 326S preamp and 432 amp. The speakers were too small for my room and didn't have any bass no matter where I moved it. So I bought the Rockport Aquila after hearing two fantastic setups all running the "formula" of Gryphons mated with Rockports, and also a third room with Rockport Mira Grand IIs and Gryphons. The sound was MUCH improved when the Aquilas came into my room, but of course still far away from the two dealers and distributor. They said it's the MLs and cabling not matching the Rockports so switch cabling to Transparent and amps to the Gryphons. Another great improvement. But the huge soundstage width and depth And sense of ease at the dealers was not replicated. And that's really myajor goal with this system.

Anyway.... I hoping for quantum leaps here with more tweaking. I'm at the point of no return so I might as well make sure I buy the right preamp too. If my system identical to the dealer then they have no excuses. But they'll have my money already.

Your room is an echo chamber period. You need at least a large area rug and probably more. There are way too many hard surfaces and not enough compensating absorptive ones. All of those hard surfaces accentuate higher frequencies making the sound thinner and brighter than it should be. Also imaging is bad because of all the reflections blurring things. Depth is lost for the same reason.

Do the following:

1. Get a LARGE area rug
2. put sound treatment absorption/diffusion on the wall between the speakers where the TV is. Your best bet would be a cover over the TV that is easily removable.
3. Experiment with some small treatment that would at least diffuse (possibly absorb) reflections from the window right near your head.

It looks like a nice big room in the photo. I find it hard to believe you don't hear a huge difference when you close the drapes behind the sofa. If the drapes are made of light weight material you may want to find something heavier. Drapes can make good room treatment too and you can open and close them at will. The wall of windows is an obvious problem. The louder the volume the worse it gets.

I found a photo from CES 2008 showing Rockport speakers with woofers firing to the inside. I know it can be harder to get side firing woofers to work with your room.
http://blog.stereophile.com/ces2008/010908rock/