Is my room doomed? Pic

"why omnis?"

See my first post above. Omnis will project the sound more evenly and naturally throughout the room. They require fewer room treatments in general in larger more difficult rooms than more directional designs. That's why I have landed on them in my difficult L shaped room where box designs and planars just could not cut it.

You can make a tough room work for you rather than trying to fight a losing battle taming the room to accommodate the speakers.

Omnis like OHMs will also enable serious listening from mostly any listening location in the room equally, even including outside of the speaker locations if needed. They also tend to produce a deep sound stage (with good amplification) mostly behind the speakers that extends past the rear wall which will help create a deeper perceived room depth.

I'd try to get things clicking with what you have first, or switch to different speakers that the dealer might offer if the Rockports cannot cut it in that room. If all that fails, OHM, as an example, does offer an extensive in-hone trial on their speakers that eliminates most all the risk (save shipping) if their speakers do not work out. The audition period is long enough to allow proper break-in as well.

Thanks for all your wonderful suggestions. Over the next few days/weeks I will try them all.

Cmalsk: FYI the dealer is being helpful. He's been here to try and tune the system and I will have him back you can be sure of that.

Richard Stacey - Cables are almost the same (Transparent on the preamp/amp/speaker except I used Reference line and he has MusicWave Ultra, and Argento on the digital front end) while I don't have any power conditioning and he does.

As far as DRC, that could help quite a lot and I will try that later if all else fails.

Rob/RTN1 - hey it's Isaac BTW (changed emails so changed login). I will take some more photos and put them up no problem. What I know for sure right now is I'm very far away from the Rockports I heard in 2 different rooms (one at the dealer, one at the distributor) running Gryphons/Transparent. I highly doubt it's the Gryphon's just because I listened extensively to them in both these rooms on the same speakers and they were fantastic (very transparent, liquid, detailed, dynamic, great soundstage, etc etc).

I will play around more with speaker positioning, listening position, switching the speaker L to R so the side firing woofers face either, and also borrow some acoustic panels/traps. I'm still skeptical as to how much all this can help if I'm not 70-80% there already. Stay tuned!

Again, thanks for all your guys's help.

Enzo,

did you hear the Gryphon/Rockport combo with a tube pre-amp prior?

That particular SS amp with a tube pre-amp is suspect for me along with the room due to its relatively low input impedance in combo with a tube pre-amp. An impedance mismatch between SS amp and tube pre-amp might account for some of what you describe you are not hearing that you did prior if SS pre-amps were what you had heard prior, regardless of the quality of the individual units.

After you try 11flat6 advice, if i doesn't help I'd agree that omnis are the way to go. You might only reach an 8.75 of your dealer perfection of 10 - but you'll never reach 10 with the room as it is now. 10's are only for treated rooms in my opinion.

Still with Dueval or MBL (only omnis I've heard recently) you can be glued to your seat and be really satisfied with music (which is what we like to pretend it's all about, right). I grant you that it's hard to change direction if you feel that Nirvana could be yours after all your work to build this system; but you've got a mega-system in a compromised setting, so it might be better to recognize that doing justice to the room is more important for satisfaction than putting together good equipment. Particularly since you are working at an extremely high level of equipment matching and it's not making you happy.

Mapman, no I heard it with the Gryphon Mirage or the Gryphon Sonata Allegro preamp. I have borrowed the Mirage in my system before. The Wavac is actually not in my system right now but I'm borrowing an Orpheus Two to get by. I can't say 100% it's not the preamp causing this, but with the borrowed Mirage unit it's better but still far away from what I heard at 2 rooms with almost identical equipment.

Anyway you are right I should eliminate the preamp as a main reason for the sound. However I have been down this route before, ie buying equipment to eliminate variables.

Previously I had Gamut L5 speakers mated with the ML 326S preamp and 432 amp. The speakers were too small for my room and didn't have any bass no matter where I moved it. So I bought the Rockport Aquila after hearing two fantastic setups all running the "formula" of Gryphons mated with Rockports, and also a third room with Rockport Mira Grand IIs and Gryphons. The sound was MUCH improved when the Aquilas came into my room, but of course still far away from the two dealers and distributor. They said it's the MLs and cabling not matching the Rockports so switch cabling to Transparent and amps to the Gryphons. Another great improvement. But the huge soundstage width and depth And sense of ease at the dealers was not replicated. And that's really myajor goal with this system.

Anyway.... I hoping for quantum leaps here with more tweaking. I'm at the point of no return so I might as well make sure I buy the right preamp too. If my system identical to the dealer then they have no excuses. But they'll have my money already.