Upgrading from Wilson Sophia 2's?

Can you give some examples of the recordings that end up sounding harsh?

I've heard the Sophias several times with a wide variety of material for extended periods in Brooks Berdan's listening rooms at his shop(and trade shows) and the two words that I would never, ever, attribute with those speakers are aggressive or fatiguing. If anything, his systems have always been on the forgiving side of the spectrum.

But, you have a top-notch system, so as few others have suggested, it might be more a factor of room interactions - or more correctly, room reflections causing the problems.

Sounds like you've got a pretty nice room.

Why not try the cheap and easy test to see if the 1st reflection from the screen between the speakers has any affect on the forward/aggressiveness?

Hang some heavy comforters in front of the screen, then give it a listen.

The front wall reflection can often be worse than the sidewalls.

I should chime back in say that the times I heard the Sophias in Brooks Berdan's setups, it was always with tube amplifiers. And they never sounded aggressive or forward.

I don't think the Sophias are the greatest thing since sliced bread, just that properly setup with the right matching equipment, they sounded smooth, detailed, and very, very, easy on the ears.

Madfloyd, are you running 50 ft speaker cables or 50 ft balanced IC's to your monoblocks next to the speakers?

Bet a set of Wolcott P220M Monoblocks would drive the living snot out of those Sophia's (in a good way)

I have a VTL ST-150 (that I use in another system) that I tried and the bass was just plain sloppy.

If I remember correctly, damping factor(an amp's control over speaker cone) goes down as series resistance goes up(with longer cables).

So, asking a tube amp(which starts out with a fairly low damping factor, already) to drive extremely long speaker cables is probably a sure recipe for sloppy bass.