Thanks for that. It makes a bit more sense now. Suitably configured, I don't find the Benchmark lacks liveliness, and it is already pretty smooth, but do agree that midrange palpability would be welcome, and more firmness to dynamics from the lower mids down would be very valuable. Depending how effective the improvements are that would leave its only flaw (to my ears and in my two systems) as low level inner detail/nuance. Although one hastens to add that I refer to a flaw only in the context of tough and more expensive competition.
For what it is worth, in playing around with configurations I found one seemingly paradoxical outcome. I tended to prefer the interior gain set to -30dB, and highish output calibration, whereas I had expected to find the 0dB gain and low output calibration to sound better. However I did not spend a lot of time with these permutations because I was really just trying to see if I could get it to outperform my Lavry, as opposed to spend lots of time optimising the Benchmark.
These days I just use the Benchmark as part of a portable high end system comprised of laptop, Wavelength, Benchmark, Sennheiser. Great travel to with.
