Hey Jason, and guys, good comments.
Jason, your first pic is clear, you will get great WAF from she who must be obeyed. No doubt.
But NOT the best sound. IF it needs to stay there, then a much smaller, more open AV setup will work better, sound much better, giving the speakers room to breath.
Your second pic, I am standing on my head and still not sure I have it figured out???
It might work better there IF it is a larger space.
DIRAC is room correction, and YES, you can wait until you get your center channel in place, in fact, until you have your system where it will finally be. It will make a difference, and you will probably REALLY need to correct audio reflections in odd shaped systems/rooms.
Other than the purity of sound your XMC-1 has, the DIRAC is it's next biggest advantage IMHO. I am using the XMC-1 with my Triton Twos to great satisfaction.
Hope this helps,
God Bless,
Wayne

Jason,

Congrats on the new gear! I bet it already sounds great but the new editions will have it sounding even better. I would certainly recommend running Dirac. Your current placement looks like it would present a lot of acoustic challenges. Dirac may mitigate that some until you are able to move your gear. That new location looks a lot more open and conducive to maximizing your sound quality.

If you end up keeping your gear in the current location, I agree with GDHAL that a smaller cabinet would be better. You could even sell it to the Wife as a decorating idea. Being able to put your electronics in a cabinets would probably appeal to her...

As Rick said regarding break in, any full frequency playback material would be fine. You could even use television programming. I found that things improved little by little over the first 100 hours, but everything sounded great right out of the box. I broke mine in while enjoying them, so the change was pretty gradual but this would be my preferred method. No point in wasting all that great sound...

Thanks for sharing pics of your space. Please keep us posted on how things sound with the addition of your new speakers. Are you planning on adding surrounds?

Cheers,

T Cobe