So Much "Harshness"

The responses given for "Harshness" in this thread appears to fit into four categories:

(1) "Harshness" caused by EMI/RFI

(2) "Harshness" caused from room acoustics

(3) "Harshness" caused from poorly matched equipment. Seems more so from speaker design.

(4) "Harshness" caused the the recorded music material played on the equipment.

Jmho, I would rate #(1) as the highest probability for harshness heard from an audio system. Computer based equipment with switching power supplies being the biggest culprit. EMI/RFI noise

#(4) being the second more likely reason.

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.....

Leasrfool, in the case of the TT-PSU, plugging it into a conditioner would seem redundant.

However, if your other electronics were plugged into the conditioner, and the TT-PSU was not, then the results might have been different.

There are many conditioners that people report worsen the sound of their systems, and the results vary from listener to listener.