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.
The greatest "high note" vocalist on earth is a ....man. https://youtu.be/FFNT4vPnHNU?si=IrN4IceIOsYMAafT Norah Jones is not talented. Her father was very gifted. But Norah..not so much, the apple fell a lil too far from the tree. She should play the piano a lil bit...here and there, get better at it and just shut up a bit
@parkergetdean wrote
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"if a high note IS produced, there isn’t and cannot be any masking going on." Not quite so easy. What if that note/portion of the band, reproduced just a bit quieter so as not to stand out as much? Even a couple tenths of a dB could be notable. The volume of the frequency response associated with an amplifier’s power depends on the impedance and this varies across that of a speaker. This could be on the order of a few dB. The lower the amplifier’s output impedance, the less variation there will be in volume across the band. If you read the speaker review testing in Stereophile Magazine, you will see that they test at fixed resistances, but also a simulated speaker load. While the static resistance loads are flat over their frequency range, the simulated speaker can be all over the place. The lower the output impedance of the amplifier the flatter this curve will be regardless of speaker load. Perhaps this one amplifier’s output impedance interacts with the speakers impedance giving a dip right where you want/need it (symbiosis).
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So far, this has been great post, with lots of insightful comments and friendly sharing of ideas and theories. How cool is it, that so many audiophiles have taken the time to help me (a total stranger) troubleshoot this issue? Let’s try and keep this positive, instead of going down the rabbit hole, which happens all too often on Audiogon. Play nice everybody! |
