People get on my case all the time for recommending certain things, but they never mention how it always turns out the stuff I recommend does indeed always sound good. The system you have, all I can say, not one thing I would ever recommend. Quite the contrary, never heard a Wilson sound good, ever. Audioquest, you could have found something okay but odds are not good. Transparent, forget about it. CD, ditto.
In short you have a system pretty much designed to achieve the results you are hearing now. If that sounds harsh, well at least it isn't so off target as speaker phase. You said the sound is coming from a narrow tube. Out of phase would be coming from nowhere. I mention this only to illustrate just how truly awful some here can be.
There is something fundamentally wrong with this system. The second sentence:
That is no way to build a system. I wouldn't even call it a system, it is more a collection of parts.
The good news is you have a pretty good integrated amp, and power conditioner. These you can keep. All the rest is what is contributing to the sound you can't stand.
The Wilson's are horribly hard to drive and really should go. They are however probably the 'least bad' of what you have and so you might want to keep them while replacing the CDP and wire.
When doing this you want to keep in mind it is the hyped up "transparent" sound that is ruining everything for you. A lot of the things you complain about, my system was doing some years ago. Now there is literally nothing I cannot put on that does not sound better than ever. So it can be done.
In short you have a system pretty much designed to achieve the results you are hearing now. If that sounds harsh, well at least it isn't so off target as speaker phase. You said the sound is coming from a narrow tube. Out of phase would be coming from nowhere. I mention this only to illustrate just how truly awful some here can be.
There is something fundamentally wrong with this system. The second sentence:
I inherited some things from my father recently and combining what he had with what I had I to come up with the following
That is no way to build a system. I wouldn't even call it a system, it is more a collection of parts.
The good news is you have a pretty good integrated amp, and power conditioner. These you can keep. All the rest is what is contributing to the sound you can't stand.
The Wilson's are horribly hard to drive and really should go. They are however probably the 'least bad' of what you have and so you might want to keep them while replacing the CDP and wire.
When doing this you want to keep in mind it is the hyped up "transparent" sound that is ruining everything for you. A lot of the things you complain about, my system was doing some years ago. Now there is literally nothing I cannot put on that does not sound better than ever. So it can be done.