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.
