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.
🤔 Hmmm. - - - After a copious number of playbacks on the analytical studio monitors and state-of-the-art headphones, the distortion on the recording was missed by: - the recording artist - the professional recording engineer - the professional mastering engineer - et al - - - Nope. 😉 Look elsewhere in the playback system. |
@audphile1 @deep_333 Exactly why I wrote "maybe not for some", thanks for commenting as expected. Eva Cassidy - another league, one of my favorites. Taylor Swift is a great promotor and business woman, who I find really annoying to listen to. |
After some critical listening on one of my other systems with KEF LS50s, I get the same thing. After switching out different amps, DACS, cables, bypassing the preamp, changing speaker toe-in and positioning and adding some additional wall dampening, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s due to speaker brightness, period. It’s a known fact that Magnepans can be bright (depending on environment) and this is pointed out in the user manual. That’s why Maggies are shipped with 1 Ohm resistors, in order to roll off some of that in the tweeter and mid panel. After adding some Mills resistors, the glare has been greatly reduced. The KEF LS50s are on the bright side too, and I’m convinced that extra brightness exacerbates the glare on that system as well. There are likely some frequency peaks in both sets of speakers and any hot vocal peaks sharing those same frequencies is the cause for the glare I’m hearing. I’d like to thank everyone who posted on this thread with their insights and suggestions. It really helped me narrow it down. Steve |
"Glare" and "Harshness" are forms of distortion if they are not actually intended for the media. For that matter, any change from the media is a "distortion" so it comes down to terms..., and picking your poison. BTW, you’ve demonstrated what I’ve been saying all along..., a $3 resistor in the crossover network can do more for the sound than a $$$ set of fancy cables or changing out a piece of equipment. Where did you place the resistors in the schematic? Did they go before or after the filter? If the crossover is second order or higher and you place the resistor before the filter, it will not change the impedance seen so the slopes remain similar, but attenuated. If the resistor went after the filter (before driver), you’ve added impedance and changed the slopes slightly.. |
