Originally Posted by
davef
Please post a picture of the front of your room where the speakers are located. Posting / uploading a picture is extremely easy and takes a few seconds of time. When making a post, simply scroll down and hit the button that says "manage attachments" Self-explanatory from there.
This is really an odd situation, in many tens of thousands of Sierra customers, you are the first person to ever describe the speakers as muddy. Running the speakers full range together with a subwoofer is simply a bad idea. In addition, having your couch against the back wall is also a bad idea as that is a prime spot for significant bass reinforcement / room modes.
Based on the fact that you like the way an in-wall / in-ceiling speaker sounds when used as a front left/right front speaker - cements the fact that either you prefer speakers with little bass or you have rather significant issues with your room acoustics. in-wall / in-ceiling speakers use the inner part of the wall as the rear air chamber. When used in open air with no rear chamber (as you did), they will have basically no bass whatsoever, typically rolling off in the 200Hz range, thus not exciting room modes or more to your preference with very little bass. In addition, a well designed in-wall speaker is voiced to use the wall for baffle compensation, when not placed in the wall - there will be a very steep rise in the midrange, perhaps also to your preference.
The Sierra-2EX are very neutral with extended and dynamic bass for a bookshelf speaker, from your description of what you are hearing, you need a speaker with a more limited frequency range and a rising midrange response. These are not those speakers and unless you are willing to post a pic of your room setup, nobody here can assist you further.
You can also email me the pic of your room.
The only other piece of advice I can offer you is to order another set of bookshelf speakers and compare directly - which is recommended because you might run into the same exact issue. Again, using an in-wall speaker used out-of-the-wall, dramatically affects the performance of that speaker in a negative way - which seems to be a positive for your preferences / room acoustics.