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

@stevehardy1 

You’re gonna drive yourself crazy. I know being I just went through the same situation, even with the same songs. It started with Nora Jones and slowly went to anything in that freq range. 
I went through (4) Streamers, replaced my DAC, had my speakers checked by the manufacture, swapped out my COAXIAL & Interconnect cables from Silver to Copper, everything you could imagine with my system. Then the issue started to arise just listening to the TV through the sound bar, I’m asking everyone in the room if it sounds raspy, everyone’s looking at me like I’m nuts. This went on for weeks till I finally decided to swallow my pride and get my ears checked.

Yep, turned out it was me, my ears from the years of enjoying this hobby to it’s fullest, as well as yard equipment, the occasional concert, etc.. Apparently some of the small hairs in my inner ear canal were starting to show signs of damage and were acting up when I’d hear frequencies starting around 800 hz to about 1.5khz.

If I were you I’d do two things, First, give your ears a break for a week to two, means back away from listening, may help.

Second, get your ears checked, you may be surprised what they come up with.

I now have a R2R DAC as well as hearing aids I can EQ through the included app and music has never sounded better.

Pay attention to the signs esp, if it progresses . If you been into this hobby for a long time, it’s probably not just your system   

+1 @erik_squires 

It seems to me that it’s most likely a room interaction - either an excitation or reflection. You could explore this by moving some sofa cushions first behind the Maggie’s and then on the side walls in front of the plane of the speakers to see if it mutes the irritant frequencies. 

Good luck and let us know how it goes.

I have chased that harshness on both the Norah Jones track and the Eva Cassidy’s Live at Blues Alley, swapping components in and out, and I think it is a combination of things. In both cases I think the singers are overloading the mikes, so it is baked into the recording. I hear it on two different systems in two different rooms. In addition, I think room acoustics can exacerbate it. The two changes I made that helped are DSP room correction (Dirac) and moving to an R2R DAC, which seems to help with these tracks as well as with poorly digitized tracks from analog masters.

Well since yesterday, I have swapped out DACs, gone direct from DAC to amp, bypassing my preamp, swapped out amps and repositioned the Maggies in various positions.  None of that has helped.  I've noticed this more since I replaced by BHK pre with the PMG Signature pre.  My hunch is that the new pre is so revealing that it exposes every wart.  I'll try some additional room treatments, although I have diffusion and absorption on the wall behind the speakers already.  

I have Maggies, and run them without attenuators.  I found Cables have a huge impact on them from interconnects, speaker and power.  For example switching away from the Blizzard power cord that tends to have a lot of energy on my power conditioner to a more softer neutral cable completely removes that pitch and still maintained extension.  same with interconnect switching from cardas cygnus to reflection same result.    Also IMO paring equipment that leans slightly on the warm side worked best for me.   As some have noted it could be the recording, you may be adjusting for those recordings and dampening down your transparency and sparkle.  Happy tweaking.