If Walter was a personal friend, and he invited me over, to ask me: "Yo homeslice, figure out how to make this sound as good as possible, and no I don't care how ugly you make it look . . . "
1. I see if it's oriented lenghtwise, or widthwise, because I cannot tell from the pic. We want lengthwise. I also see if he is backed up to the back wall, where I would then pull the couch away as far as I could get away with. A final compromise could be to pull couch for critical listening, and pushing it back for everyday life.
2. I play with speaker positioning, big time. I mean big time. Like they are in the way, and you can barely walk around that area. Depending on the seated distance, I'd pull mains further apart from each other, and further away from the front wall. Use stereo only to figure that out.
3. After that I'd play with the center speaker. I would ideally like to raise it more, decouple it more, and pull it from front wall more.
4. If the mains image much better with a significantly greater space between them, I might swap the positions of right main and equipment rack, and left main with subwoofer(s).
5. If this kind of spread is ideal, make sure to toe-in ideally. Also, because of the much closer position of the right speaker to sidewall, acoustic treatments might become more desirable at that sidewall as well as corner. Regardless if anything changes at all, treating the front wall will likely have benefits, ESPECIALLY when the speakers are already so close to that front wall.
That's my start . . .
You can blindfold Walter so that he doesn't immediately dislike a setup because of the aesthetic/practical compromise. But, if a certain setup sound sooo much better, even if as an impossibility, you/he will likely be more motivated to find that perfect in-between compromise. If he agrees to be blindfolded, it could be fun to strip down naked when he's not looking, before moving stuff around.
