Listening Room or Components or my ears?


My system is sounding a bit harsh, hard, shrill. (Cronus Magnum lll Amp, Focal Aria 948 Speakers, Denon DCD 1700NE CD Player, Shunyata Gamma Cables). It is just CD play back at 1/3 volume. It's a basement, L shaped room. Carpeted cement floors. The Speakers are 3 foot from rear wall. Left speaker 2 foot from side wall. Right speaker is 15 foot from side wall. Speakers are silghtly toed in and a 6 foot apart. Equipment rack and two subs between them. The wall behind the speakers is covered in framed posters. Is this an obvious fault? The walls themselves are wood paneling. Is there a problem with only one apeaker next to a side wall? Ant thoughts or suggestions? Thanks

bzawa

Showing 1 response by rbstehno

IMO, if you are having this problem with a Rogue magnum 3, which is very warm sounding (I had 1 for years), it’s both your speakers and the denon. You have no dac and the denon isn’t any good. The focals are also on the cool side of things. 
start with a new source, get a good dac, the best you can afford and stream ripped or Qobuz/Tidal to see if your sound gets better. I use Roon on an external server where thousands of cds are ripped to a local ssd, and then I subscribe to Qobuz, but using Roon you just play music at it determines if it’s coming from your internal disk or from Qobuz.

If that doesn’t help in the sound quality, either get new speakers that are more neutral or get a couple of subs for the focals