I have not experienced that, but my room is not the same as yours. The purpose of YPAO is to flatten response and partially compensate for room anomalies. That explains your soundstage shrinkage. To be clear, I am not recommending that you disable YPAO. I recommend that you use it for awhile, get accustomed to it and then maybe try it disabled, but be certain when "going manual" to set the subwoofer crossover to the recommended SVS Merlin setting for your speakers and adjust the volume accordingly. Mine is set to -13dB. When using YPAO, set the crossover over 100Hz and the volume to at least half-way.But when you disable Ypao, doesn't the volume automatically go down? On my rn803 if i disable Ypao, the volume drops a lot and soundstage kind of shrinks.