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My system is bright? I need help. thanks

Hi. it is my first time here in this forum. i would appreciate input and help from all of you. No sacrasm or bad langauge please. I had bad experience with other forums in that aspect. music loving people and audiophiles should be an elite, high caliber and classy community. This is rare to find today. Ok Down to the point.

My system
Musical fidelity kw 500 sacd player. I use the tube output.
Musical fidelity kw 500 integrated amp.
speakers:eggleston andra (not andra 2)
speaker cable: satori acoustic zen
interconnects: Nordost baldur and nordost quatrofil RCA
USe a dedicated 20 amp line with regular power cords(came with the gear) and a panamax 20 amp surge protector and filter.

This is in my family room so there is little room for treatment and moving things around.

problem: bright. the highs are killing my ears, after 1-2 hours of listening my ears start to hurt,sometimes 3 minutes. I have to turn the volume down. I tried postioning, it got a little better. I will try acoustic zen silver ref II may be it will help. The sound is otherwise phenomenal, i could be happy with more bass, but overall it is very good. Depth, tranparency, acuity and soundstaging are great. As for mids, i can see the person infront of me,I can hear the articulation of the tongue in the mouth before the words and tunes comes out. no kidding, but not for long because of fatigue.

I would really appreciate your input.
Scientist73
scientist73
audphile1's avatar
audphile1
5,273 posts
 
Scientist73, I have no idea what is wrong. But in my opinion, the amount of hiss you're getting should not change with different volume settings(although I am not familiar with MF equipment, normally, hiss is not an issue). MF equipment is tubed, so some hiss I guess is normal. The only thing I can think of that's causing the hiss to go up in volume with volume increase on your amp, is that your CD player hisses and the amp just amplifies this hiss. In this case, you won't get rid of it unless you change your cd player.
And by "there" I mean in general, in your set up and not the wall outlet. outlets don't hiss. Power cord will not cure it. I mentioned Shunyata Hydra2 because you were interested in surge protection, which you will get with Hydra. And also because Hydra is a passive unit(no transformers), it should do a fine job by not presenting any kind of barrier for a current flow into your amplifier.
audphile1's avatar
audphile1
5,273 posts
 
oh, and you know what else to try....try switching from tube out stage to solid state on cd player then see if the hiss persists/keeps on increasing with volume on your integrated.
stehno
1,453 posts
 
Scientist73, it should not be surprising that removing your previous line conditioner actually improved your sonics.

Now that you can hear that not all line conditioners are necessarily good or created equal, you might consider looking for 'proper' line conditioning.

I would like to strongly suggest staying away from surge suppressors or line conditioners that offer surge suppression.

Among other things, you'd be amazed at how proper line conditioning on all components will, among other things, remove all negative sibilance (except that which is imbedded in the recording itself).

As for your hissing problem, I would have suggested it would be your preamp, but since you have an integrated, I have to assume it's coming from there or...

If your digital cd player is not on a different circuit/line I would suggest trying that because you want to keep the AC of the digital source as far away as possible (electrically, not geographically) so as to minimize the bi-directional digital noise injected back into the AC in the wall and potentially making its way back to the service panel and into other circuits. Another good reason for proper line conditioning because a proper line conditioner should be able to provide bi-directional filtering and most do not.

This too could be contributing to the unusually loud pink noise you're hearing.

-IMO
scientist73 OP
36 posts
 
well right now i have the kw 500 hooked directly into the wall and the kw sacd is hooked into monster hts 5100 that hooked to monster avs 2000 that is attached to the same dedicated line.

your suggestion is to pug that monster with the cd player into another outlet, like the 15 amp home outlet next to it.

i ll try it. thanks
electroid
283 posts
 
I have an MF Trivista SACD tubed player. It took a while to get the harshness out. It took a very good power cord, regenerated AC, and the right interconnects. PS Audio noise harvesters really helped clean the AC of junk that the components themselves put back into the line. That MF amp you have is a bit bright for my taste. Tame it with the right power cord, the stockers don't cut it on either piece of gear. Room tuning will help but if its bad enough now that you get fatigue after a short while thats not the room in my opinion. By all means improve the room but the room can't be the problem in my opinion. Bad power can be. Many people overlook how much noise gear puts back in the line. You either need an isolation transformer on every piece of gear or a noise harvester in my experience to keep the line cleanest. Too bad huh? You figure you spend that kind of $ andit should be enough. My experience it isn't no matter whos gear you have. Good luck!

ET
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