I am currently running marantz sr6006 to emotiva upa 1 through paradigm studio 100s.
I am having problems with the top end being to bright and harsh. I had a similar problem when I had wharfedales and a pioneer receiver.
Audessy also has the same verdict dropping the high freq down.
Where should I start new power amp new speakers better room treatment new receiver.
I was thinking maybe a parasound a31 power amp. Or maybe a tube pre.
You should start by putting those Paradigms up for sale.
Those are speakers I auditioned at length at a good dealer, in a good room, with good Rotel amplification. My principle reference speaker in the room was a pair of B & W 802 Ds.
The Paradigms sounded nothing like the B & W 802 Ds, nothing like them.
The Paradigms had pretty much every vice I can't abide or tolerate in a speaker.
The bass was wooly exaggerated and ill defined. It was clearly a high Q speaker.
The HF just fizzed at me and the speaker was sibilant indicating problems in the 4 to 5 kHz range.
Listening to the last movement of the wonderful Sibelius second symphony through those speakers was a severely unpleasant experience I will never forget.
Digging up what I could find on measurements showed I was not wrong.
The bass tuning is far too low and one of these very poor sounding so called extended bass alignments.
You can see the dip of the saddle between the tuning peaks is around 20 Hz. No drivers of the size in those speakers is going to have an Fs anywhere near that frequency.
The result: -
There is a rising response below 300 Hz, peaking at 60 Hz. However you know this will sound even worse than it looks, as it has to be a speaker with high Qts. Speakers like this have very poor bass quality, and these did.
In addition this tuning has resulted in a very poor impedance curve and phase angles. So yes, it could embarrass some amps.
Looking at the frequency response there is indeed a rise in the 2 to 5 kHz range. This is a very bad place to have even a small rise. The response above 7 kHz is just awful and ragged. The tweeter on those speakers is just bad pure and simple.
However it is worse then it looks. The lateral response is less than stellar.
This results in this spatially averaged response: -
You can see their is a whopping 5 db rise in the 4 to 5 kHz sibilance band.
So that is why your speakers are sibilant and why they fizzed at me.
This all adds up to a less then satisfactory spectral decay plot: -
So Audyssey was correct in shelving the HF. However it will not cure the situation, as the tweeter is in break up mode well in the audio band, so there will be a lot of retained energy and unsatisfactory HF performance.
Those measurement explained what I heard and severely disliked about those speakers. More to the point they also explain your dissatisfaction with your system.