1. Home
  2. speakers
  3. 198456-115932

Do You Ever Get Glare/Raspy Sound on High Pitched Female Vocal Lines?

I sometimes get a harsh glare or slightly raspy sound on female vocal lines when they sing loud, high pitched notes.  It’s hard to explain the sound exactly, but if you’ve ever experienced it, you’ll know what I’m speaking of.  Two examples are Norah Jones, Don’t Know Why at 1:57 with line  “You’ll be ON my mind”.   The other is Michael Bluble’s Quando, Quando, Quando featuring Nelly Furtardo.  Her line “I can’t wait a moment more, Tell me quando, quando, quando” at 1:53 is another good example.  This happens at moderate to fairly loud volume levels. 

Trying to determine if it’s coming from the midrange section or quasi ribbon tweeter, I’ve disconnected the speaker jumpers from one while keeping the other jumped and found it occurs in both the midrange and the tweeters.  I’ve also swapped out two other DACs and have bypassed the preamp by going directly to the amp from the DACS, but it makes no difference.  It doesn’t sound like clipping distortion or typical speaker breakup.  I’ve even inserted 1 ohm resistors on the Magnepans  and while it reduces it a bit, it’s still there.  I can also hear it to a somewhat lesser degree on my old Theil 1.5s and KEF KS50s at fairly loud, but not crazy volume levels.  Both of those speakers are driven with 400 watt @ 4 Ohms and a 300 watt @ 4 Ohms amps respectively.  I can’t imagine that I’m clipping the amps.

Does anyone else have this occur on their systems?  Any ideas on what’s going on here?

My system is Magnepan 3.7x speakers, PS Audio Airlens, Stellar Gold DAC, PMG Signature preamp & BHK 250 amp, streaming Tidal. 

stevehardy1
toddalin's avatar
toddalin
659 posts
 

I hear it in lots of cuts.  The more revealing I make the system, the more it stands out.  (Like an upper frequency "hash.")  Best I can tell is that it is either in the recording process or more likely, in the digital transfer.  I’ve also noticed that some cymbols don’t fare so well in the digital transfer.

But, knowing it can be there, I’ve planned for it.  I put a "TUBE" setting on the crossovers that puts a 3 mfd cap/20 ohm resistor in parallel with the Heils.  This typically takes care of it without too much high frequency loss and provides a different experience.

Listened to Nora (YouTube to the rescue again) and there is definitely a "resonance" in her voice at that point that could easily interact with a speaker/room.  I would have to listen "more intently" but there could be some "hash" in there too.  Sometimes, a singer will get too close to the mic overloading it and the padding in the board is not set to account for it and you end up with distortion.  Certainly lots of examples of that!

Sometimes, in extreme cases, the singer doesn’t even need to get near the mic for a distorted sound if the padding is off.  I bet Eric cringes every time he hears this:

https://youtu.be/4-J41AdchlU?list=RD4-J41AdchlU

BTW, Listen to Eva Cassidy, Live at Blues Alley, and you may hear a few passages similar to what you heard from Nora.

xmbw4
37 posts
 

It may seem like an odd question, but what kind of cables are you using?

dwest1023
353 posts
 

Recently I purchased a Micromega M 100, since they are clearing them out. On first listen with some female voices, I heard what sounded like clipping. I changed speakers and same thing. I even plugged headphones in and heard the same clipping noise. I called dealer and they sent me a new amp. Played it, and same thing. I figured it must be characteristic of this amp. I have 7 other amps and never heard this issue. The amp does not have any footers to speak of so I bought some inexpensive ones from Amazon and lo and behold the harness went away. The footers seem to change the whole characteristic of the sound of the amp. 

8th-note
467 posts
 

Interesting post. I hear something like this too on a variety of music. It's an upper midrange/lower treble harshness that sounds like distortion to me. I have wondered if it is something in my hearing because it can be worse or better depending on the day. I just turned 71 so I'm always afraid that maybe the problem is with me.

I'm using Thiel CS6 speakers and Krell amplification. I just bought a pair of Dynaudio Confidence 60's but I haven't put them in the system yet. I'm interested to see if they have the same effect. I didn't notice this when I was auditioning new speakers.

I have run REW and my decay time is around 550 ms which isn't too bad but I'm going to work on bringing that down to around 350 to 400. The waterfall plot is quite good so I don't think there are any room interactions that is creating this problem but I am on a quest to see if I can tame it.

stevehardy1 OP
122 posts
 

Well just to complicate matters, I listened to the trouble spots in both tracks I mentioned in my opening post (Don’t Know Why & Quando, Quando, Quando) through two sets of headphones from my studio.  They were Sennheiser HD 300 Pros ($220) and HD 600s ($500), using my studio’s RME ADI-2 DAC headphone jack.  None of the grunge present on the Maggies was audible through the phones.  I don’t have any conclusions other than it doesn’t seem to be imbedded in the recording.  Frequency response on them are 6-25k and 12Hz-39kHz.respectively.  Hmmmmmmm.......

More to discover