Sometimes I think my main hifi setup in my (large, acoustically bright, hardwood floors, large windows, etc) living room is contributing to listening fatigue — after like 30 min I am done done done. In my smaller office (carpeted floor, more furniture, and smaller KEF LSX speakers) I am a happy clam for a much longer time.
Is there a frequency range that is known to contribute to listening fatigue (e.g. that I could attenuate with a PEQ filter) or are the factors less controllable than that?
Distortion is the main thing that contributes to listening fatigue. Amplifiers and speakers contribute to this, but rooms can introduce significant distortions as well. If you are sure your amp and speakers aren’t introducing distortions, you might consider using room correction software to produce a convolution filter for Roon.
For me, metal tweeters contribute distortions that my ears have a hard time with. Part of this is that I was born with a hearing defect that enables me to hear frequencies above 16 kHz, so metal cone breakup is hard for me.
Being Roon users we do not depend on amplifiers for tone control. There is still MUSE 
Also, if the OP has an iPhone he can try HouseCurve and measure what’s going on in his room.
Strong reflections and reverberation definitely are the main contributing factor in your case, unless pieces in your chain are broken.
Unfortunately, the situation can only be tamed by physical absorption and diffusion - there’s no easy way out here.
Congrats to the specialists, in fact, you could write that the influence on hearing fatigue is the type of coil feeding the crossover. In short; The biggest influence on hearing fatigue is the Sound Level with which you listen to music, this leads to fatigue of the stirrup muscle!.. and thus changes in the tension of the eardrum, and damage to the auditory chambers in the cochlea… (look up specialists how long and at what volume you can listen to music before you irreversibly damage your hearing) The frequency phenomenon is either Misophonia, or auditory hypersensitivity…
Max
years ago my then 3-yr-old poked in the tweeter domes and inverted them both (L and R speakers); I only discovered this weeks later and managed to pop them back out using suction from a vaccum cleaner. Sometimes I wonder if that pooched the acoustics (they are 2-way speakers).
If they don’t produce scratchy sounds or show ruptures in the dome/surround, you are very likely fine.
Please understand, that you’re not giving us much to work with, really…
Show photos or sketches of your room layout, give dimensions, SPLs your usually listening at, speaker and amp models, and so forth!
true. Here are some details:
Cambridge CXN V2 streamer/dac
Cambridge CXA 81 integrated amp
Linn Ninka two-way floorstander speakers
Two storey living room, hardwood floors, two-storey windows on one side wall, open to hallway/front foyer on the other side wall, open to kitchen behind listening position. Room dimensions approx 6 m wide by 5 m deep.
Listening levels normally 60 dB - 70 dB but sometimes I feel like I want to go slightly higher to get a more robust bass response (speakers are sealed cabinet and 50 Hz is their rated bass response).
Mostly folk, jazz, pop, some classical, occasionally rock (usually 60s/70s/80s). Usually streamed via Tidal max or redbook CDs ripped to FLAC streamed via Roon/Rock NUC.
Here is a recent measurement from HouseCurve:
I have encountered a similar situation numerous times, and you are not alone with this.
According to my experience, distortion is not the main reason for listening fatigue in such environments, nor is it tonal problems. It is in many cases simply the existence of too much reflections and reverb from the room´s numerous reflective walls hitting the listener harder than the direct sound coming from the speaker.
The problem is exptected to dramatically worsen if the listening distance is too high for the given RT60 of the room or if you use speakers with either a broad dispersion pattern or uneven direcitivity index over frequency bands. Many speakers on the market tend to have a partially decreasing directivity index in the frequency band the tweeter kicks in usually leading to ´harsh, hissy, sharp, metallic, annoying´ brillance bands (3-6K in most of cases), or an increasingly narrower directivity pattern highlighting the upper mids. Unfortunately the most recognized and oftentimes recommended high end speakers fall into either category.
Mentioning the smaller KEF speakers, it is likely that these do not cause the same effect thanks to smaller listening distance, lower RT60 of the room and increasing directivity index towards higher frequencies.
There are bands which might be contributing to fatigue, but it is more likely that not particular bands are too loud but the reflection pattern is dominant. An EQ would not help in this case, neither would any DSP, room correction or whatever.
To get an understanding to which extend the room reflections are causing your impression, I recommend to listen to the main speakers in a nearfield environment, i.e. placing them much closer to the listener as usual (and much closer means 1.5, instead of 4m, for example).
If uneven or dominant reflective sound field of the room is the problem, room correction or a convolution filter would not help. They are not capable of erasing the reflections.
Before using room correction, one should take into account that the ratio between direct sound and indirect sound for a given frequency band is depending on RT60 and directivity index of the speaker and cannot be manipulated electronically.
There is a way out in many cases. Either reduce the listening distance and set up something closer to a nearfield environment. Or choose a different type of speaker offering constant directivity over most of frequency bands (400-8,000 Hz) of a reasonable level derived from the room´s RT60 and the desired listening distance.
Not familiar with this particular model but from the specs (double 6.5" d´ Apollito plus very tiny dome tweeter) it is very likely they deliver an uneven directivity pattern leading to a lack of indirect sound energy below crossover point and a very broad radiation pattern hence overflow of energy higher than the frequency the tweeter has taken over. The latter might be responsible for listening fatigue in first instance.
This is true.
got out my umik-1 and rew and oof this is quite the reverb situation
I think this is telling me the living room is not the right room in which to enjoy my hifi !
time for a man cave I guess lol
To be pedantic, I was including those as distortions in my response…
Very unusual RT60 which might also result from REW´s time windowing combined with uneven D.I. and some cancellation resulting from room modes, so to know more measuring with designated omnidirectional speaker in a fully diffuse field would be more precise. Room acoustics are definitely on the difficult side when it comes to finding matching speakers and listening distance.
There are speakers to handle such situations if the listening distance is not extremely high. Something like fullrange horns, line sources or cardiods might do.
Sorry, have missed that, as the standard definition for either linear or nonlinear distortion does not include such phenomena.
Is this including modern lightweight metal domes such as Beryllium or Aluminium-ceramic tweeters with breakup frequencies very far from the audible band?
As it turns out, no. I don’t know if you happened to catch my profile, but my main speakers do employ Satori Beryllium tweeters, which have a wonderful top end yet are compatible with my ears. I trusted Jim Salk implicitly when he designed my speakers, as I was negotiating something different originally, and he came through 
As I said, no easy way out …
Okay, maybe our understanding of what is easy differs. In some cases just getting closer to the speakers by 1m helps a lot. Admittingly, in case of the OP I have doubts about that as problems with RT60 and the tweeter´s direcivitiy are presumably more severe.
For unknown reason, the SB Acoustics tweeters are not very popular among pro loudspeaker designers, so I am not familiar with any speaker deploying them. But I have heard nothing but praise for these, being said to be similar to the well-known Scanspeak equivalents. So I would say we are on the same page here.
There are a lot of excellent, rather smooth and transparent-sounding metal dome tweeters on the market. There might be exceptions, but I would disagree with any theory of metal diaphragms being a general reason for fatigue and harshness. In my understanding it is rather a coincidence of metal domes being capable of handling lower x-over frequencies so are often found in designs with uneven directivity.
My fault for not classifying Beryllium as metal in the way I posted. I’ve been wrongly inspired by others who do the same. I should have referred to traditional vs. non-traditional metals.
The reflectivity in that room not only looks severely high, it also is probably very different for the left and right sides, with the glass window side sending more reflections causing an imbalance that the ear-brain is trying to compensate for, resulting in fatigue. Room treatments would go a long way to overcoming the above.
Another topic not yet mentioned in the replies is time and phase alignment. A shrinking number of speakers now sold are designed to maintain time and phase alignment. About 10% of the population is particularly sensitive to this and fatigue is a common problem from those listeners. In any room, lack of time and phase alignment will be a trigger for some. Sloping designs with the tweeter further from the listener are usually part of attempts to correct time alignment. Phase alignment means that all drivers are wired so that the movement is synchonized to move towards/away from the listener at the same time. e.g. if the midrange is wired backwards vs. the woofer and tweeter, when you hear an instrument scale notes between tweeter and midrange, the sound of the scale will confuse the ear-brain. For many of us, speakers that don’t consider time and phase alignment often cause listening fatigue as we tire from the effort to make sense of the unnatural arrival if notes at our ears.
That’s very interesting thanks for that. I can believe the L vs R differences in my living room contribute to very large distortions. In some ways given all the responses here so far I wonder if my living room may be the worst possible place to listen to music! Room treatments are a no-go at least for this room.
The funny thing is we have one of those small portable Sonos speakers (“move” I think it’s called) for taking out to the pool in the summer ; and otherwise it sits on a small cabinet against the wall between the living room and the (open) kitchen … and my wife’s preference is usually to listen to music on it because “it sounds better” (and also because she finds it easier to use).
