Harshness in music with Vantages

[akm3]

From Ken Kessler's 2006 Hi-Fi review of the vantages:

This is posted on the ML website...

"Revealing

Caveats? The speaker is so revealing in the upper registers that you will hear the difference in D/A converters and CD players, especially any tendency toward digital sibilance. The speakers sound best with valves. They need to be at least 2ft from side and rear walls. They like some toe-in. That's it."

I have a tweaky suggestion: Put a 1 ohm resistor between the speaker input terminals and your amps output. According to JonFo that is the trick Sunfire uses for it 'current source' sounds, it should dampen the shrillness a bit. But only do if it you biwire because you don't want to muddy your bass.

Oh, and I don't know how I would actually DO that...

-Allen

 

[gordonmenninger]

wow, pretty interesting stuff... I also thought you may have a an issue with your room being too bright at first. Now that you have solved your problem, you may still want to acoutstically treat the front/side walls for much added improvement in decreased "shrillness" and improved midrange and soundstage... some simple acoustical treatments really can put any ML speaker on the next level (which is hard to do!
You may want to post a pic of your room in the acoustics thread or read mine and others posts there regarding acoustical panels behind the speakers. happy listening

 

[jmschnur]

Thank you for all your quick replies.
What I'm experiencing does seem apart from harshness, some kind of distortion.
The piano sounds like a rougher version of a piano, and a female singer's voice sounds like she's got a sore throat(croaking) or something. It's not brightness, but just an unnatural sound.
At lower levels I can't hear them, either because there is no distortion or maybe the flaws in the CD just weren't heard.
Yes I agree with Beakman, with this set up, individual CDs have "incompatibilities" with the system where there is no one configuration for all CDs. A bit annoying but maybe this is true transparency haha, where all flaws in recording, mastering etc are revealed.

Anyone else have owned Innersound or Sanders amplifiers and would care to comment?

Thanks!

I have found I need to vaccum my Vantages every4-6 weeks. If I forget to do this the sound seems to get degraded. I use a Bryston amp.

Joel