@stevehardy1 another example of the issue you ran into with Nora Jones’s recording is the track “I may know the word” from Natalie Merchant’s Tigerlily and Paradise Is Here albums.
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.
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@stevehardy1 - I streamed both tracks on my system to no glare of any sort at those time stamps you indicated. Seeing it was a digital source you heard this on, I believe it’s not just a single issue that’s causing the glare. Grounding your digital source components well will help. Researching low noise and ripple linear power supplies for your modem, router and streamer will help. Using an Ethernet throttle cable you can DIY will help (Google Eric Geiss and ethernet-sound.com for this). Using a Delock 62619 surge protector/network isolator right before your streamer/server will pay dividends. All of these are super affordable essentials for any digital system : ) In friendship - kevin |
That’s cute. Lucky for you her recordings sound great on any system. not sure you read the whole thread @macg19 but the OP added resistors on speaker drivers to combat this issue with the recordings he mentioned in this thread.
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@audphile1 Good, wasn’t intended to be serious. While Patricia isn’t my favorite I agree her recordings are fantastic quality. I have Night Club on Impex 1STEP and it sounds great. I did read the whole thread so it seems like it was an issue with the the OPs speakers, I don’t know much about resistors but I assume it attenuated the offending frequency, so maybe it was the speaker ok the room or a combination of both, so in effect the resistor was like a 1 band equalizer? but as described, it is not the recording. Like I said in a previous post I heard a similar issue and corrected it by adjusting the speakers positions. So in my case at least, the glare was cause by the speakers interaction with the room and each other. So it’s a frequency + volume issues that is being “tuned” not the artist. No different really than using Flight of the Cosmic Hippo to evaluate bass response. |
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