PS Audio Perfect Wave DAC upgrade to DSD?

Room treatments: really good idea.

And please look at those measurement in Stereophile and think about whether the speakers should stay in your system, given the issue you have mentioned.

Thanks mike_in_nc, I have looked at the response curve nearly every time someone tells me the speakers are the problem, and yes different speakers are in my future, maybe they should come first but man it’s going to take some traveling to listen and audition, which is going to take some time, and if there’s a patient audiophile out there it sure isn’t me.

re the room, I just got a new chair (geofkaitt convinced me the Poang foam was horrible for acoustics, he was right, if anyone’s keeping score rack one up for the ‘gon’s best jester) and will be building some step diffusers over the next month and keep experimenting with placement of absorption.  I have to make a hard choice re the ceiling - keep a fan or replace it with absorption panels.  Not sure what else I can do in terms of treatments.

So where I have landed for now - better power conditioning, upgrade the Ethernet cable, keep working on treatments etc, hold off on the dac upgrade and start the speaker search.  This should satisfy the demons for a while.  Second pair of speakers will give me a chance to modify the crossovers on the Thiels.  Unless I change my mind along the way.  

@thosb -- Thanks for the reply!

I’ve been in a situation where auditioning speakers required a 4-hour car trip. It’s tough. After buying, I found that what had impressed me were the acoustics of the listening room, not only the speakers. So my journey into room acoustics began....

I will go out on a limb by making a general recommendation with very little knowledge of your tastes. If you can’t audition, and if you like acoustic music mainly, something in the British monitor tradition might be a great choice -- one of the Harbeth, Spendor, Stirling, or Graham models, for example. They are known for natural timbre and smooth frequency response.

I’ll close with the view of an old audiophile. It is interesting to me to participate in different fora. On AV Nirvana, DSP is king. Here, people put a lot of stock in cable swapping. On the Steve Hoffman forum, it’s LPs and midpriced equipment. And so on. After 55 years of doing this, it seems to me that changing cables is a thing to consider after everything else is right. It can sink a lot of money for results that are much harder to hear than fixing fundamentals -- which I consider to be speakers and room acoustics. It is more difficult to do the fundamentals -- the items are bulky and heavy -- but the improvements to be found are incontrovertible.

Whatever you do, I wish you a lot of pleasure doing it!

When I was shopping for my first set of speakers, which turned out to be the Thiels, I did listen to Harbeth and Dynaudia Special 40s, and they just didn’t have the jump factor or immersive qualities I have heard from bigger speakers.  I was starting from a pair of borrowed Maggies, perhaps it was this reference point?  Re music tastes, yes I do listen to acoustic music more than others but do like to rock out from time to time.  I guess I will earn some audiophile street cred by driving hours to listen to speakers.  

It affects us all:  Impressions of speakers change over time, as we listen to them more. What seemed impressive at first can become irritating after six months' listening. I have no magic bullet for dealing with that (but I'm pretty sure the answer isn't swapping cables).

I have found that eliminating slap echo and taming first reflections tends to reduce treble irritation, though it reduces spaciousness at the same time. I've concluded that the spaciousness lost, though pleasant, probably isn't found on the recording, but rather generated by the speaker in the room.