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System phenomenon when playing loud

Great Friday Greetings All,

I'm experiencing a phenomenon which I’ve never encountered before.  When cranking some tracks to an admittedly on the loud side level, sometimes the highs and mids become suddenly muted.  Not gone altogether, but very muted.  It occurs like a switch being flipped, no fade-out, it happens in an instant.  My system is:
Triangle Volante 260 speakers 
Parasound JC-1 mono block amps 
Sonic Frontiers Line 1 preamp
Recent purchases are a Panamax power conditioner and a Yamaha Cd-S2100 CD player.  Please note, I have experienced this phenomenon several times before acquiring the conditioner and the CD player, so it’s not those.  Can anyone guess if it’s the preamp, the amps, or the speakers that’s the culprit?
When I turn the volume down, the upper spectrum returns like nothing happened, and I can turn it back up some, but I’ve been shy about going back to the level it was at when the phenomenon occurred.  There are no attendant noises the happen with the suck-out, and there doesn’t appear to be any distortion when playing at that level, and I have listened for it. It’s not like the amps are clipping, audibly.  The tracks that this has occurred on are pretty intense rock tracks.

Puzzled, I think I’ll have a Martini.  Any thoughts appreciated,

Dave
dprincipato

Showing 1 response by mikelavigne

mikelavigne
2,210 posts
 
retaining coherence and detail as the music scales (get’s louder and bigger) is challenging. mostly (1) it’s the room, next most significant is (2) the set-up, and next (3) is the relationship between your amplifiers and your speakers.

what you describe is completely normal, and a proper step to finding higher performance. you are realizing that things should sound better, and interested in getting them to do so.

much can be done without spending money or changing gear. but to help we would need to know the room size, where the speakers are, what is on the walls (where are the windows?), where do you sit relative to the speakers, and how loud are you actually playing.

the gear you have listed should not likely be the big problem, if it’s a problem at all. it’s all competent stuff. it’s possible you have a part failing in one of your mono blocks too; do both channels react the same? i would do a little playing around only listening to one channel at a time to isolate this issue to a whole system problem, or an amplifier problem.

one other thing to check is if there are any adjustments on the amps for impedance or bridging or anything like that that possibly is getting tripped that changes the speaker loading.
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