How to fix my detailed, accurate but BRIGHT system

You'll never get the results you seek because you are not willing to address the causes of the brightness and you reject the cures. You have a very large room and you use very inefficient speakers. Your room's surfaces are very reflective, yet you use a wide dispersion speaker. Acoustic rooms treatments - can't do! Equalizers - won't do that either! That leaves you with only one possible way out -- a preamp with built in EQ. Check out the various current and past model McIntoshs. But be warned, it's still a band-aid type solution. The mismatch between your room and your speaker is the real problem.

It would immensely help if you would post your system and include several pictures of your room.

Sage advice from Onhwy61..

Thank you for your posts. I will try to find some time to post some pics of my room. I think you will then see why I can't do treatments. I have tried a couple of experiments that have taught me alot about what sound I am looking for. First of all with TVADS advice, I tilted my speakers up by placing 3/4" footers under the front spikes. This mellowed out the harshness from the upper mids and highs alot, but still too bright for me. Second experiment was to by a Yaquin Tube buffer which I placed between my pre and dac. This completely changed the sound. The sound evened out with much more base, more lower midrange and a much warmer, smoothed out presentation with a nice amount of decay. Now, grant you this buffer rolls off the highs a bit, softens up the base and takes away some detail. But, it gets me much closer to the warmer more anolog sound I seek. The third thing I did, again as an inexpensive test is picked up a Play Station 1, $10.00. This was to take my dac out of the system which I believe may be, as someone suggested above a big part of the problem. I didn't expect the PS-1 to sound near as good as it did. I see why people like them. It does lack alot of detail, even more than adding the buffer, so it's ultimately not for me. My conclusion "so far" is that I like the sound much warmer and organic than what I have now, but I don't want to sacrifice the detail to get it. So, something I would like further input on is this. Should I replace my dac with a tube dac that has more detail than the low cost products I tested with, or should I replace my pre with a tube pre to get the sound I am looking for? What dac in the $1 to $1.5 thousand dollar range would fit the bill? Or should I look into a tube pre? Thanks for your help!

Greg

Tvad is correct. Don't keep asking for miracles if your not willing to make the sacrifice...tile floors in the man livng area? Ouch...get some throw rugs at least and some decrative fabric/cloth window treatments.