Originally Posted By: Hellcommute
Tough one. Your amp is not your bottleneck here.... major sonic upgrades will need some investment in getting your room layout and speaker placement better, ie. getting the mains off of the wall and spaced better. The stair wall is creating a bad acoustic reflection that is no doubt coloring the sound and narrowing your soundstage. Investment probably not worth it with your current room config. smile


The stair wall is not ideal, but the layout is a small trade off compared to the gain in usability. You can see from the pictures below how awful it was before. Switching to that wall allowed me to use the storage room behind it as a hidden AV rack. And rotating the room allowed for a full sectional which really helped with the seating arrangements.

The YPAO does a pretty good job at balancing the room out.