Three suspects, and the fix depends entirely on which one it is: the room, the pairing, or the settings. Do the free ones first.
The room. Indian living rooms with glass, tile and bare walls reflect treble mercilessly, and reflected treble arriving late is exactly what the ear reads as harsh. Clap once in the room. A metallic ring or a fluttering echo means the room is your amplifier of harshness, and turning the volume up feeds it. A rug between you and the speakers and curtains over the glass are the cheapest tone controls in audio, and they work on every source at once.
The pairing. Bright speakers plus modest electronics driven near their limits get hard-sounding, and this shows up precisely as harshness only at high volume. When an amplifier runs out of clean power it clips, and clipping adds high-order distortion that sounds like glare rather than a nice warm overdrive. If your system is fine at conversation level and nasty at cinema level, amplification headroom is the leading suspect. Speaker sensitivity matters here: a low-sensitivity pair asks a lot more of the same amp for the same SPL.
The settings. Switch off "loudness", "clear voice", dialogue enhancement and any sound-enhancer modes. Check the EQ is not boosting the highs, which auto-calibration occasionally does when the mic picks up an absorptive sofa. For music, try pure or direct mode, which bypasses the processing chain entirely and often removes the edge on its own.
Where does the rule stop mattering? Some speakers are simply voiced bright, and no rug will re-engineer a tweeter. If harshness persists at all volumes in a treated room, the speaker's own character is speaking. That is a preference and matching question, not a fault, though it is a real one.
Still fatiguing after the free fixes? Tell us the exact speakers, electronics and room surfaces, ideally with a photo. This one is very solvable, but the solution for a clipping amp and the solution for a glass wall are different purchases, and I would rather you made the right one.
Not sure what fits your room and budget? Share your room size and budget on WhatsApp. It is a two-minute answer with a floor plan.
