Micro position adjustments

Space forward your rack doesn’t change the negative effect on speakers providing good soundstage, depth, and imaging, IMO.

I also have a mixed room; 2 channel and HT. All my equipment, and TV, is off to the side.

A TV screen in between the speakers, even when behind, to me, is a ‘no no’.

I get that some cannot have a set-up with ‘nothing’ between the speakers, but if you can, might be worth a shot to try. If concerned about speaker cable lengths, IC’s, etc. That is why some put their amp and pre on the floor between speakers. On the floor minimizes the negative effect.

By the way.....just put on Art Pepper - Straight Life.......second track bass is incredible, deep, defined.....Art’s sax is recorded well too. And great jazz....

Anyone that’s got it, throw it on!

Things do get weird.  Sometimes tiny changes cause huge differences both good and bad.  Sometimes what we think are big changes make little or no difference at all.  Only the fact you can recreate the effect by carefully repeating your changes saves us from concluding the whole process is just random chance.  

IMO speaker placement (including distance from the walls, toe in, and rake angle), as well as furnishings, may tend to have a more significant impact than the choice between two good amps or between two good DACs. I'm amazed at some of  the photos I see of very expensive gear with the loudspeakers crammed up against the walls and corners (along with minimal furnishings or room treatments).

We have a pine cabinet in the left corner of the front wall.  Test tones seem to demonstrate its impact on imaging.  An up-moving right-speaker test tone will seem to go straight up from about eye level toward the ceiling behind the right speaker. However, an up-moving left-speaker test tone will seem to go straight up from about eye level, then abruptly shift to the left after it reaches the top of the corner cabinet.

https://www.audiocheck.net/audiotests_ledr.php

@tk21 That is so cool, I have a pine cabinet on a wall in an unfortunate place too. I can observe similar phenomena listening to music that creates a realistic and convincing sound space. What I experience is a deformation of the ’stage’. If you can imagine one of those inflatable soccer domes and then imagine one corner has collapsed inward, kind of like that. Music isn’t obviously being lost but spatial cues which give a sense of volume and depth of the space are definitely being altered. Interestingly switching to some digital versions of the same track often produces a great or even total reduction of the effect. I can’t and won’t claim that I observe this with 192/24 files but but with 96/24 or Red Book it isn’t that hard to detect. With low res formats it can be quite dramatic. This seems to indicate that the signals are deficient in spatial cues which are always subtle and tend to exist in the uppermost registers where low resolution digital suffers the most. I certainly don’t want to start another slug-fest over the merits of various formats but the concept of ’imaging’ was hotly debated when it first emerged and the same standard arguments emerged from those who had never experienced it to explain how the observation was impossible (ie. I’VE BEEN AN ELECTRICAL ENGINEER FOR 232 YEARS AND HERE IS WHY SUCH A THING IS TOTALLY IMPOSSIBLE) Of course they are regularly exposed as the absolutist idiots they are when someone makes a discovery that explains very nicely the effect that the IEEE dunderhead 'proved’ was impossible. These are exactly the same individuals who in the late ’70s declared digital ’perfect sound forever’ with books of explanations and equations ’proving’ that digital accuracy HAD to be 100%. The discovery of jitter, aliasing, filter ringing, extinction effect etc. went a long way toward explaining why open-minded (eared?) listeners were unhappy with digital sound. The standard explanations about needing to re-learn how to listen and the beloved "flaws in the analogue source material"’ did nothing to generate faith in the recording industry or audio press (they have confessed to lying) or, interestingly, improve the quality of digital recording. The sound of digital recording did improve by orders of magnitude immediately after the recording industry and the press admitted that early digital recording wasn’t very good. To summarize, digital got much much better the moment it stopped being ’perfect’. Of course the story never ends here because even today we have someone saying that their 17 PHDs in physics and calculus and Electrical Engineering proves that you are suffering the aftereffects of LSD if you think your new speaker cables actually changed the sound. If you want to have some fun, find an old article from the time when these ’experts’ proved that a turntable could NOT affect sound quality. Show that article to a modern ’denier’ and be prepared to be amazed at how elegantly they PROVE that the two situations have absolutely nothing in common.