So Much "Harshness"

Picking up on what Al said. Some complain about the perfection of recorded classical music, how unatural and dehumanizing it is. Its gotten to the point where some are disappointed with live performance because there are mistakes.

Chashmal, I don't think a great deal of this brash sound can be fixed with tubes. I have nearly all tubes in my system, still hear plenty of brashness, harshness and glare from poor recordings.

Its true, too many contemporary recordings sound like crap, a major reason my collection is only 15% contemporary. Too many remasters of old recordings are also bright, glary and hard.

To speak to one of Al's points, correcting mistakes in orchestral recording doesn't generally have anything to do with the number of mikes used. If a note is missed, it cannot be fixed if there is not another take with the correct one. There would be some exceptions, but not many. Almost never is there only one take done of anything, unless it is from a live performance, and even then they usually have what they call a "patch" session, in case there were problems in the same spot of every performance. Recording a symphony orchestra is indeed very expensive, that is why many orchestras have turned to self-produced recordings from live performances, generally sold only in the local area.

Tvad, I do have a TT-PSU that I use with my P5 turntable, perhaps this is why the power conditioner had such a negative effect on the sound??

Assuming everything is in good working order to start, then most often either because downstream electronics cannot reproduce the sharp transients found in many digital sources cleanly and/or amplifiers are not properly matched to drive a particular set of speakers properly and/or speakers not matched to room.

Noise/distortion present or introduced into the line level signal can exacerbate the problem certainly as well.

Also I believe it is seldom due to the recording other than that some digital recordings are hard for systems to reproduce cleanly again due to the sharp transients present. That is more of a problem with the challenges of playback than it is with the recording itself.

A few strategically placed tubes can definitely help I have learned of late. They seem to act as natural and highly effective high pass filters that definitely take the edge off things in avery natural sounding way.

Oh, and lets not forget about jitter in digital playback systems, though I think this is less of a real problem in general with newer equipement these days than it used to be.

I think that pretty much covers it....

Lots of causes resulting in lots of cases as the poster observes.....

Hi Tvad, I did not plug the TT-PSU into the conditioner when I tried it, just the other electronics. It still had a very negative effect on the sound when the turntable was the source. I had read that these type of products generally have a better effect on digital sources than analog, and on video sources than audio, for that matter, and my experiment confirmed this for me. When the CD player was the source, the effect was only very slightly positive - slightly better bass, actually, which was a little surprising to me, and a slightly cleaner overall sound. With the turntable as the source, though, it was a drastic difference for the worse. The soundstage was greatly shrunken, and dynamics were compressed quite a bit, especially on the soft end - the softs were nowhere near as soft with the conditioner as they are without it. This was again a surprise, I would have thought it would be the other way around. Loud dynamics were also slightly compressed. The timbres of acoustic instruments and vocals were also not produced as accurately with the conditioner - it seemed to remove overtones is how I would describe it - the timbres were not as rich and complex as they should have been, and are without the conditioner. It also certainly removed much of the ambient noise of the original recording space. I realize that there are many others who have experienced a positive difference with power conditioners on vinyl - my brother is one, actually. He was present when I tried it and was particularly disappointed in the outcome in my system, since it works great in his. His set-up is quite a bit different from mine, though.

To get back more on topic here, I guess my point is that since these type of products will not make a positive difference in all kinds of systems, then one cannot consider them the most important fix for harshness, as some in this thread have suggested. They certainly won't "fix" a bad recording job, or "fix" overly bright equipment. IMO these things are much greater causes of "harshness" than electronic noise, though this is indeed a cause in many cases as well. I do find it interesting that most people I know with low powered amps and high effeciency speakers seem to complain much less about electronic noise in their systems anyway, and almost none of them (again, that I know) use power conditioners. I have to wonder if that has something to do with it. Maybe not - anyone else reading this have any thoughts on that?