In-Room responce measurement with Legacy Focus SE speakers

There are a host of reasons this sort of thing can occur and it usually is a combination of factors including, bad speaker design, defective driver, bad amp/speaker match and room acoustics. 

A peak at 100-130 Hz is going to make a system with what I call wet bass. I like my bass dry and always put a 2 dB notch there. What you describe is usually too much energy in the 2 kHz to 4 kHz region which makes a system difficult to listen to at volume and very sibilant. This is a very common room problem. 

Listening to a multidriver system near field is a very bad idea as you start to hear the individual drivers. If you want to get an idea what the speaker sounds like in an anechoic environment take it outside and place the speaker on a 5 foot ladder on soft ground. What a PITA that is. 

DEQX solves the problem by taking a very near field measurement of each driver at 6 inches then measurements from the listening position. From these measurements it can extrapolate what is due to the room and correct for just that and not the sound of the speaker which you do with EQ to taste. This is what your father's system needs, a DEQX Pre 8. Then he can make it sound however he likes. 

@amtprod If the room is really bad there will be positions where the woofers won't be functioning. You have to walk around to find the bass.

The single most important aspect to building a great system is finding a good room to put it in. When I was a graduate student down in Miami the huge showroom at Sound Components sounded great. It was something like 30 X 100 feet. In the meanwhile my system was crammed into a studio apartment and the bass was....difficult. In the public health service I rented a house that was open concept. None of the spaces were particularly large, but walls were missing everywhere and it sounded great. The house was one big diffusor. When I built my own house I had that in mind eliminating walls and doors where possible. I also use speakers with very controlled dispersion which helps a lot. Unfortunately, It does nothing for bass. That is where 4 subwoofers come in. If you are running on a budget Audiokinesis sells it's system for something like $2500 for an amp and four subwoofers. If you can spend more Kef makes a great little balanced force unit and Martin Logan has a pair of balanced force subs. After that it is Magico and even if you can afford them they are big and ugly. Everything else on the market is standard fare. If used with digital bass management they can be OK but not as good as the units I mention above. 

@amtprod The problem with rooms that size is you start to get into echo problems. That echo gives away the size of the room. You want to hear the acoustics in the recording, not those of your room. You wind up in the wrong venue. The solutions are to break it up with a wall or barrier, a lot of sound absorption and speakers with tightly controlled radiation such as horns, dipoles and line sources. In a room that size I would want to see at least four 15" subwoofers. My room, is 16 feet wide and I use eight 12" subwoofers. Getting out below 30 Hz at volume takes a lot of driver. Speaker specs are very misleading. We do not listen to our systems 1 meter from the speakers and they never mention the room. A speaker is going to sound different depending on the room. Another thing a room that large might benefit from is a line source. A full frequency line source needs to be 32 feet tall or stretch from floor to ceiling. Line source speakers project sound better by an order of magnitude which is why you see them at big concerts. Sound Labs would make you an electrostatic speaker 40 X 118" With four 15" subwoofers you could have one h-ll of a party. 

@amtprod There is no such thing as overdoing it. The more you kill what the room is doing the more you will hear what is in the recording including the third dimension, which is not the sense of depth as in distance it is the sense that the instrument of voice in front of you is a three dimensional object. The only caveat is that bass does not respond to room treatment. You start with enough acoustic power to do the job, then you tailor it with digital signal processing to sound right. 

@erik_squires I the Earthworks Mic. It is not USB, but it does not require a calibration curve because it is dead flat and smoothly omnidirectional.