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Last Critical Tweak… how to quell occasional high harshness…?

Dear Audiogon Community,

 

I am so impressed with the insight and obsession we all share with this musical alchemy of electrons. I write to address a simple problem through as simple (and hopefully relatively inexpensively) as possible… though before such elegant maneuvers, an overly verbose and fussy description:

 

 

Harshness in the highs…. Trumpets and some vocals now make my ears shrill at times. My aging ears! It is so close to musical bliss, but this slight edgyness must be quelled!

 

This song, horns seem to shatter. 

This song, vocals seem to pierce. 

 

I recently leveled an entirely new system. My last tweak was to move my main gain tube to Mullards, and the Brimar NOS tubes to the outer gain location. The mullards afforded a richness and expansiveness, a forward mid and elegance, but introduced the occasional shrillness which I seek to quell. 

 

My musical electron dance is as follows on the streaming side:

 

Nagra Streamer —> Audio Zen MC2 Coax —> Halo Audio Spring 2 Level 3 Kitsune —> Duelund 16 GA Interconnect —> Prima Luna Dialogue Premium HP —> Brimar NOS outer tube and Mullard NOS main gain tube —> Gold Lion KT77 Power tubes —> Duelund 16GA Speaker wire —> Pure Audio Project Duet Horn’s with a gold silver oil Mundorf Cap upgrade —> Duelund wire to the horn and the 15” Woofer. 

 

Fun yes! Devine! But how to quell this one last occasional shrillness?

 

Thoughts:

-Speaker Wire to 12 GA

-DAC - Amp Interconnect changed to something that mellows out the shrill

-Main Gain tube upgraded from a Mullard NOS to something else… (I believe there was a slightly higher grade Mullard?)

-Nagra Stream - DAC Coax cable upgraded to something mellower….?

 

Open to any and all suggestions! Thank you so much for your insights. 

 

R. 

whyrichard

Showing 1 response by mgrif104

mgrif104
420 posts
 

Some good suggestions here. I’m going to suggest a different path. I see two potential culprits:

1) tube microphonics. It’s possible your tubes are introducing distortion from resonance. Only way to really tell is to try something different, which, of course, changes the sonic character overall. But better tube quality does not guarantee lack of microphonic excitation.

2) Get ready for the eye rolling from the usual suspects in these forums, but I banished my last bit of harshness with the addition of the Reiki Audio superswitch and linear power supply. I had a different upgraded (modest) in there and I was skeptical if it brought anything to the table but kept it in anyway. Marginal improvement at best, and perhaps my imagination. The Reiki brought immediately apparent improvement. I’m sure there are other switches that would do the same, but I can personally attest to this one. Digital artifacts are hard to banish and none sound good like 2nd order harmonics do from tubes. At least worth an audition.

My $.02.

Good luck.

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