The HF roll-off has to be the culprit. Gotta be. I am convinced.
Hindsight is 20/20. I have run Audyssey quite a few times. But for some rash ridiculous reasons, the first thing I probably did was turned off the "Dynamic EQ" because I probably thought that it was the same as "Dynamic Compression"!
Or perhaps the Dynamic Volume was turned on, which totally screwed up the SQ!
And the plain Audyssey w/ the high frequency roll-off made it worse for me.
But after a couple of days now (I ran Audyssey again with 8 listening positions spread around my main spot), I am very happy with Audsyssey Flat, Dynamic EQ ON, Dynamic Volume OFF, and all channel levels, XO, and Subwoofer setting manually changed to the way I had them before Audyssey.
I kept the distance setting along with the Audyssey Flat EQ and Dynamic EQ, but changed everything back manually to my previous settings.
Audyssey set my Funk Sub levels to -12.0 and KEF 201/2 levels to -3.0 !
No way! I set my 201/2 speaker levels to +6.0 and my sub levels to +3.0.
I want lively crystal clear sound, but at the same time, I want that kick drum to slam me in the gut and knock me out breathless!
I can't say enough about what Dynamic EQ does for the bass! My jaws dropped!
All this time I thought "EQ" was a bad word even though GranteedEV and Nathan Funk and a lot of people have tried to reason with me.
I guess you can teach an old dog new tricks after all. It might take a few years, though.
My subs are passive, so I guess Audyssey is doing 100% of the EQ for my speakers and subs.