Help. Wife says Teres 340 Is too bright.

Late to the party. Is there any wine left?

I don’t believe your wife is hearing excessive upper mids/highs. I believe she’s hearing distorted and smeared upper mids/highs. This important distinction points to different solutions. If I’m correct, rolling off the highs won’t help – you need to clean them up, not reduce them.

When you upgrade a major source component (or two) to a more resolving one, the reduced noise and sound floors pass additional information. This additional complexity can test other components in ways they hadn’t been tested before. I disagree with suggestions that “you only changed the TT/arm, so the problem must be with them”. That sounds appealingly straightforward, but it’s far from true IME. Rather, I think the increase in signal complexity has exposed shortcomings in other components.

You've listed a c-j MF-2500A as your amp. Are you still using that? If so, the new rig may have exposed its limits. I know this amp well because we used one for several years. It’s a good mainstream product from a mainstream company, but it can’t really cope with the full complexity from a top quality vinyl rig.

Fortunately, your Silverline speakers are easy to drive. You have no need for a high wattage SS amp. What you need is an amp that can maintain clarity when fed a complex mixture of closely related waveforms (e.g., vocal and instrumental harmonics).

When we compared our MF-2500A to our present amp (Doshi-modded Lectron JH-50) the difference was breathtaking. I could go on about the areas in which the Doshi is better (name anything, it’s better), but for this thread it’s just worth noting that it reproduces HF’s and harmonics with jaw-dropping clarity and cleanliness. It approaches the purity of the best SET amps, but with enough push-pull power to drive all but very difficult speakers.

Consider trying out a top quality tube amp. Take advantage of your speakers’ being easy to drive. I think your wife’s ears would enjoy that experiment.

Thom,

Don't forget he's running through stepups. Resistor values are different than with an active MC phono stage and, as Swampwalker mentioned, tiny changes are (should be) audible.

Stepups create more complexities than active MC gain stages (turns ratio? primary side loading? secondary side loading? both?). We spent years tuning stepup loading, including pairing parallel resistors to achieve intermediate values. The quality/type of resistor matters too.

Suggestion to Artemus: try some Riken Ohm resistors in place of your cheapies. If you get the right value they might remove some edge without rolling off the highs.

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Regarding amps and power (wattage):

Maril555 gets better performance from a 150wpc BAT than from a 90wpc p-p amp. OTOH, we get better performance (despite more difficult speakers) from a 57wpc p-p Doshi/Lectron than from a 240wpc SS MF-2500A.

There's no reason to doubt these reports, so there's no correlation between these improved performances and increases in total wattage (for the reasons Lewm explained). In a typical home environment, speakers like Artemus's or even our B&W's simply do not use the full power output of a 57wpc amp, never mind 90, 150 or 240. The improvements must be attributed to other factors.

One reason the Doshi/Lectron so easily outplays the c-j is its massively overdesigned, overbuilt and well isolated power supplies. Power supply modulation by dynamic, complex signals is a major source of sonic congestion, smearing and harmonic distortions. Zero feedback is another, as Lewm mentioned. With speakers like these we don't need more power (watts). All you get from more watts is more SPL's, and we can easily surpass 100db in our room with the power we have. What we need is an amp with a very low noise and sound floor, that supplies current instantaneously and which is not prone to going muddy when the going gets tough.

I suspect Maril555's BAT is simply better at these things than his old p-p amp. The fact that it offers 150wpc vs. 90 is interesting, but not relevant with speakers like these.