Orchestral brass and fanfare - analysis of system


The question is - where do the elements of great brass reproduction reside in a system? In the story below, I think performance is limited by either my amp or tweeter. What do you think?

And now my story ...
My system at present:

Electrocompaniet EMC1 CDP with MKII upgrade
Pass Labs X-1 Pre
Krell KAV250a amp
B&W Nautilus 805s
Audioquest interconnect
Discovery speaker cable.

What I hear from individual solo brass instruments:
Lyrical sound with good harmonics and good "Pratt".
Equally good with coronets, flugels, trombones, baritones;
french horns may be a little compressed - but then that is their natural sound. Works equally well on loud and soft passages.

What I hear from symphonic brass in fanfare is different:
[e.g. Copland - new world symphony ]The "Pratt" is still there, mids and lows are good, however the highs become compressed at LOUD volumes. On low volume passages the system relaxes into my comfort zone again.

My own thoughts:

1. Is this the sound of clipping?
2. Is this the metal tweeter on the 805s?
3. Is this amp unable to open up the speakers enough?
(Krell generally has plenty of headroom - even the KAVs)
4. Have I hit the wall with what my speakers can do?
judit

Showing 2 responses by newbee

you might just be overloading your room with the high frequencies. I assume you ment Copeland's symphony #3, and i'm assuming that you are referring to Reference Recording's edition in HDCD. You might try a some different recordings to see if you have a continuing problem or if your problem is with this one cd and your cdp.
stenho, what i was referring to in my post regarding the CD i thought judit might be using was that this disc is HDCD encoded and i don't believe the CDP being used has HDCD playback. It's not supposed to make a difference, BUT the other day i placed a new dual layer SACD disc on one of my CDP's (not SACD) and it sounded poorly, however on another non SACD player it sounded quite nice. There is nothing wrong with the Copeland RR disc - i have it and love it. Great Brass! perhaps this is not the cd that is being used - in any event multiple CD's should be used for testing.

Judit, you are absolutely correct on the value of good bass to the spectral presentation (of most any instrument) however i'm not sure how that would affect the congestion that you hear at high levels in the upper frequence range which would be produced by the mid range/tweeter elements. are you suggesting that you could have an overload of the whole system at high levels, or that the sub cross over (i'm not familar with the REL) could be causing some problems. If so, you might try taking it out to see if you still hear the same congestion.