Glare on Choral recordings, classical vocals

How nice to read this thread. I haven’t noticed this until a few days ago and finally found this topic here.

While listening some choral classical music FLAC files using a cheap earbud style (but with the head band) Sony headphones I started to hear some strange noises during certain passages of the music, especially when the music was very busy, combining choirs and instruments. I would say that the sound was "pixelated" for a lack of a better description. Initially I thought perhaps the file had some encoding problem or the headphones were faulty.

I tried the same files on a Oppo BD-105 with a pair of Samson headphones and, the strange distortion was there, albeit much less noticeable. If I turned the volume higher I could notice it more. Next I tried one of the original CD where the FLAC file was extracted from and there were no differences, so the FLAC file was not the problem.

I normally don’t listen classical music with headphones so perhaps that is the reason I didn’t notice this issue before. If I played the music from the Oppo through my amp to my speakers it was more difficult to hear it, but with the right volume and being very close to them I could hear it.

After these initial tests I suppose the problem is related to the DACs at work here. At this time I am not willing to spend large sum of money on a new DAC, so any suggestion of a budget one, but which is capable to overcome this problem, is very welcome.

As a side note, I connected a pair of Jabra USB headphones that I use for work and these sounded much more muffled than the others, but they also didn’t revealed the "pixelated" sound.

My experience mirrors that of @mahler123 - improving my DAC reduced the congestion at higher levels on choral material.

Harshness as you describe is most likely due to jitter. Better clocking of all devices, be they ethernet switches, your cd player, server or Dac is the remedy of choice. if digitsl is properly sorted, mistracking on vinyl is more probable than harshness on digital

Well antigrunge, having never heard harshless digital, I would have said the opposite. But your ears are your ears.

I had this when listening to sopranos in loud passages with speakers that had metal  dome tweeters. It was solved with new speakers with soft dome tweeers.