Before you change a single piece of gear, get your speaker placement right — it makes more difference than almost any equipment upgrade you can make.
Roughly half the system problems people in the HiFi Family bring up — muddy bass, collapsed soundstage, forward or fatiguing sound, imaging that won't lock — turn out to be placement problems. The gear is often fine. It's simply in the wrong spot. And there's no universal formula, because the right approach depends on how your speaker is designed. A speaker with a relatively flat on-axis and off-axis frequency response — like the Aspen series that Chris Brunhaver developed — can be placed with minimal toe-in and still produce a wide, stable image across the full listening area without requiring you to be locked in the exact center seat. That's rare. Most speaker designs have narrower dispersion and need significantly more toe-in to maintain coherent imaging.
Know what you have before you start moving things.
Distance from the rear wall matters almost universally. Bass needs room to develop, and the back wave from the cabinet needs space before reflecting back into the room. Speakers pushed too close to the rear wall tend to sound thick and slow in the bass, with a flattened presentation that loses depth and air behind performers. Getting the front baffle at least a few feet from the rear wall is a reasonable starting point for most designs.
Here's something that often goes overlooked: even with ideal placement for imaging, the bass in the room will still be uneven. This is a room problem, not a speaker problem — bass wavelengths create pressure buildups and cancellations that shift dramatically depending on position. Moving the main speakers to fix the bass almost always breaks the imaging.
What would happen if you added a subwoofer instead?
A sub can be positioned independently, wherever the room cooperates acoustically, to fill in the bass your main speakers can't deliver consistently from where they need to be. This is true even for full-range loudspeakers.
The room doesn't care about their specifications — it only responds to physics.
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