Bookshelf speaker recommendations

I currently have the Paradigm Mini Monitor v3 and for the price are good sounding speakers but they are way too midbass heavy like boxy sounding. A few options I was looking was the Dynaudio Audience 42 or 52 or even the Contour 1.1.

Assuming you’ve already exhausted all feasible placement options (positional eq) with you and your speaker, just get a affordable streamer like the Wiim Pro Plus....or A Wiim Ultra. Such full featured streamers are good for a lossless digital files and some streaming kinda guy like yourself.

They come with several bands of parametric EQ. You could bop some midbass band down, adjust Qs, etc, etc and tailor the Paradigm to your taste.

I have been using my media player and luckily it has a 20 band EQ. The only frequency I need to cut is between 200hz and 300hz maybe up to 350hz. Streamers with that capability is a plus. There is so much I can position the speakers.

Assuming you are sitting in the center and about 2ish feet from the back wall or right up against the back wall, you will have 2 modal peaks (lengthwise and widthwise) coupling around 230ish hz. You could have heightwise modal peaks in that band as well depending on your head height/ceiling height.

When the modes start to couple like that in a squarish room, it can feel much worse perceptively.

It is not your speaker’s fault really, as you can see. Many speakers will have similar issues in your room. You could try to treat some of this with aborptive panels that are atleast 4 inches thick, but, considering your room’s small dimensions, it may eat into your room space. Parametric EQ could be an easier friend here. Try to not use the poor GEQ implementation in your PC’s media player or the DAC in your PC. You could use the PC just as a control point (w/ control app) to control a higher quality dedicated streamer/dac such as the Wiim.