Listening Room or Components or my ears?

Do you have anything soft in the room? 

Suggest getting some floor rugs, and curtains for any windows. 

My room has 2 big floor to ceiling windows, the reflections where harsh. Picked up some heavy home theater curtains, they transformed the space, were approved by the boss.

I would invest in a DAC first, I suspect the Denon has a lot of digital noise and that the built in DAC is not the greatest quality.

If you like wall art consider acoustic art panels.  These are sound absorbing panels with your choice of art printed on them.

Generally speaking though, if you are in a basement with reflective surfaces it’s almost not worth any speaker upgrades until you contain that... OR you go with speakers with heavily controlled dispersion patterns like horns or electro-statics.

If you are interested to learn how much this can improve things, try putting up blankets or tapestries on the walls.  Something thicker than sheets.

Also, if you are in a basement don't forget your ceiling tiles.  Replacing traditional tiles with drop in acoustic panels should be part of your mix if you have a drop ceiling.

I have never liked the sound of Focal speakers, just to "French" which is very similar to man if not most Asian preferences as well. I would still do a good job of room treatments first and you might find they suite your taste just fine, if not then tuning if you can electronically, cables or tweak the crossovers to reduce the output of the tweeters or use a filter to tame the band width that is the issue. This could even be done on the exterior of the speakers or the output of the amp depending on how they are wired.

Rick

As others have mentioned your problem is the speakers.