Shouldn't This Sound Boomy?

@mijostyn 

Thank you for the further information, in which you introduce how you tune a system from a measurement perspective.

I tune my system and everything that influences the sound that I have control of, from a listening experience perspective. 

You and I approach the subject using different methods and, if it works for either, both (all) of us, then who is to say which method is right or wrong, or more right / more wrong? But, we should be careful when advising forum posters what to do. Our advice may not be appropriate for their needs. At best, we can only generalise.

I have spent almost 50 years getting my audio replay to sound in a way that I believe delivers a palpable, entertaining sound, with presence. I have found that measuring the audible spectrum, cannot help me with the all important spatial information, nor can it help with the individual listener's perception of sound. I have also found that there is an inextricable trade off between dynamics and musicality. The best we can hope for here is a compromise. These subjectives are some of the issues that make our hobby such fun, can result in frustration, and do help to keep the hifi industry alive. This, or any other forum, is unable to allow us to debate the subject without introducing misunderstanding of each other's thinking via. the narrative. So, I respect your opinion and, I trust you will understand mine. More of my thoughts can be found  (if you can obtain a copy) in HIFI Critic Vol 12 / No1 on p42-44 in an article called Tuned To Perception. Perhaps you will find it interesting?   

Kind regards,

BP

When looking at response, 5dB/division please.

Bass looks okay. I would tame that one peak.

The dropout at 2K is a far bigger problem. It’s 10db. That is very audible. I would prefer more slope at high frequencies.

You said you had panels. You may have too many of them may work over a narrow frequency band. Fully carpeted?

@larry5729 the system is a Hegel H390 integrated amp and an Audiolabs 6000 CDT Transport using the Hegel's internal DAC. The speakers are Tyler Acoustics Highland H3.5s rear ported three way speakers. The room is treated with 4" diffuser panels on wall behind the listening position and a 2' x 4' x 4" bass absorber behind each speaker and a 2' x 4' x 4" diffuser panel on each side of the speakers. I have a stack of rockwool panels centered behind the listening position at the floor.

@theaudioamp the room has an area rug covering the entire floor. I have a tv and stand between the speakers and I cover them with dense foam to keep reflections from them to a minimum. I am going to run a test with no treatments and then add one treatment at a time and see what I get. I agree, the 2k dropout is a problem. I hear sounds clearly in my car that I can barely hear on my home system and I believe the sounds I’m talking about are in this range.

@bobpyle , unfortunately Bob, your ears do not a reference point make. You can not tell someone how to make their system sound like you want to hear. What is it that you want to hear? Well perhaps you like your system a little brighter. What does that mean. You can not say. 

None of this, except the way I tune my system to my taste is an opinion of mine. It is an approach that all serious professionals use. And you always start from a reference point and that reference point is a flat amplitude response across the entire audio spectrum. The technology to manage audio systems was not available to us back in the day. I got my first record player in 1958 and it had a tonearm that looked like a cobra and even had eyes painted on it!  Getting anything to sound right was a hit or miss proposition. People still behave as if this is still the case. It is not. With the right tools one can make almost any system (includes the room) sound good, maybe not great but in many instances surprisingly good. There are some rooms and situations that are totally hopeless but they are relatively few. The situations that are fantastic are also relatively rare, I am talking about rooms that were specifically designed for audio reproduction with speakers like your if you are a point source kind of guy or mine if you are into line source dipoles. 

You can never trust anyone's ears. People tend to like what they are use to listening to. To a person whose system is falsely bright a system that is correct will sound dull. If a person tells me he likes his treble advanced 3 dB/oct from 10kHz I know exactly what he means and can even imagine it. I can make almost any system sound the way I like without ever playing any music. If I analyzed your system I could tell you exactly what you are listening to, not my opinion of what you are listening to.