Devialet on the wall

[Hifi_swlon]

 Thing is, my living room is my listening room, and there's no way to accommodate any changes really, so its already fighting suspended wooden floors, hard surfaces but with a few soft furnishings like sofa/chairs, no doubt all in the wrong places - that's London houses for normal people.

IME the biggest thing hurting sound quality is the design fashion of modern rooms. The most important part of getting a good sound is the room and the speaker and listener positions in it. Loads of hard surfaces for harsh reflections and often no carpet will never sound good. You can spend a million pounds on a hifi and it will still be imperfect if the room is bare and the speaker position has to be compromised.
One thing I have found helps in reflective rooms with brightish speakers is to toe in the speakers so much that their axis crosses well in front to you. This reduces wall reflections and keeps you off the tweeter axis.

In the case of the remote (not the app the rotary volume control) I have had no problems vertically mounted. I don't know exactly how it works, but it does not use wifi (the remote worked fine before wifi was added and the hardware supplied)

Thanks F1. Yeah, would love a dedicated listening room but that's just not going to happen any time soon - sadly just have to make the best of what I've got. Extra toe-in's one I've not heard of or tried so definitely putting that one on my list. Might look a bit odd but if it sounds good, I'm in!
Remote-wise (yeah the proper controller), interesting, I thought it was wifi. OK, so even so if its RF maybe just a bit more gap between it and the wall might help.

In any case I'm liking the sound much more this week, but I've tinkered with a few things so can't say for sure what it is:
I've swapped in the new Van Damme (4mm OFC hifi) speaker cables - the brand PMC apparently use (bare wire speaker ends - straight through both terminals removing the links), I've tidied up all the cabling and kept the mains neater and more separated, the mac mini has been plugged into a wall outlet instead of an extension lead, the old speaker cables have all been taken out (they weren't plugged in but were still lurking), and the AQ Jitterbugs have been in for a few days. I also did a round of plugging everything in and out several times, 'Naim style'. One or all of those things has made a positive difference. There's a much more '3d' soundstage for a start.