Well, although I’m not generally a fan of Sony receivers, my guess is that a harshness as significant as you describe is not likely to be because of the Sony. That said, I have generally liked the sound of my Onkyo and Denon receivers. These new receivers at the price of the Sony 1080 generally only weigh about 20 pounds, and I just don’t see how they can manufacture them to have great audio at that price. They tend to have very light power supplies and current output.
Since you can return the Sony, it won’t hurt any thing to send it back and move up to a higher level receiver, along the lines of a Denon 4300 or the new Onkyo TX-RZ920. You could experiment with that before spending money elsewhere. If a higher quality receiver fails to improve the harshness problem, then I would next evaluate your speaker situation and, as mentioned above, room reflections(you have a lot of square inches of very reflective TV screen in that room).
I’m also not a big fan of most metal dome tweeters, and it appears that you have a lot of them in the system. Considering your high frequency goals of " smooth, sweet, soft, silky and gentle", you might be better served by speakers with soft dome or ribbon tweeters. Changing speakers will make more difference to your sound than anything else.
P.S., high end audio people will strongly advise against placing two sets of speakers right next to each other like that, on the contention that they will interfere with each other’s performance due to reflection and possibly absorption of sound, affecting the sound stage and imaging of the sound.
Since you can return the Sony, it won’t hurt any thing to send it back and move up to a higher level receiver, along the lines of a Denon 4300 or the new Onkyo TX-RZ920. You could experiment with that before spending money elsewhere. If a higher quality receiver fails to improve the harshness problem, then I would next evaluate your speaker situation and, as mentioned above, room reflections(you have a lot of square inches of very reflective TV screen in that room).
I’m also not a big fan of most metal dome tweeters, and it appears that you have a lot of them in the system. Considering your high frequency goals of " smooth, sweet, soft, silky and gentle", you might be better served by speakers with soft dome or ribbon tweeters. Changing speakers will make more difference to your sound than anything else.
P.S., high end audio people will strongly advise against placing two sets of speakers right next to each other like that, on the contention that they will interfere with each other’s performance due to reflection and possibly absorption of sound, affecting the sound stage and imaging of the sound.