Why do my RF-5s sound so bad?

[Jay S.]

My RF-5s make a very annoying sound. Almost like clipping, but in the speakers, not the electronics. This happens at almost any output level, but I only notice it with accentuated vocals. Particularly female vocals. I was just listening to the song "Mushaboom" by Feist, and it was quite noticable when she sang the words "house" and "hat", particularly the "ou" and "ah" sounds. Most of the time these speakers sound pretty good, but when they distort like this, it sounds horrible.

If anyone has ideas, please let me know. I bought these speakers a year ago, but was ot to sea most of that time, so they have just a couple months of use. Now I'm a student, so I don't have the luxury to be buying/selling speakers all the time. I'm stuck with these for a while.

My setup is as flollows:

MacBook -> Apple Lossless -> Lite DAC-AH -> Cayin A-50T -> RF-5             or..

MacBook -> Apple Lossless -> Lite DAC-AH -> Trends TA-10.1 -> RF-5

same result either way.

Like I said, it doesnt really matter output level I'm playing. They just make that harsh sound on vocals.

thanks,

Jay

[pauln]

This is getting interesting... there have been a couple of recent threads about music sounding bad... my vote is that the modern digital format is being pressed to loud when recorded. The clipping sound might be in the recorded signal itself?

[michael hurd]

It is not the speakers, it is the source material, and the soundcard has a bit to do with it. Try them with a real CD player and an integrated amp or receiver. I bet dollars to donuts it will sound one heck of a lot better. Beg, borrow or steal some equipment to try this with. Every codec is different, and some are downright awful.

Edit: My bad, I missed where you were using a DAC, so you can pretty much take the soundcard out of the equation. My guess is either the recording is poorly mastered, or the codec is having issues. There are many different formats, and they all have some quirks. Can you borrow a CD player and play actual cd's rather than compressed formats?

[DrWho]

Would it be possible for you to share a sample of your music that causes the clipping? If we can rule that out right away it would make things much easier to diagnose.

Can you describe the nature of this sound? Does it happen in both speakers? Is it more of a clunking, clacking, clinking? If you put your ear up to the offending speaker(s), is it happening in the tweeter or woofer?

One thing you might try would be to remove the tweeter from the speaker and then make sure the compression driver is mounted securely to the horn. Sometimes these can come loose and rattle around.

[djk]

The old CD player in my computer had a problem with the 44Khz beating against the switching power supply in the computed and making vshhhht sounds on louder sustained higher piched tones.

Very annoying.

I bought a new magic do-all CD/DVD/read/write piece and it's worse.

I replaced the supply and it's even worse.

I bought a new sound card, same problem.

I give up.

Back to the dedicated hi-fi for me.

[Jay S.]

Ok, I'll try to get some clips of some of the ones that sound bad. But as I said, it isn't just a random occurance, but very frequent on vocals. I'll check the compression drivers. One thing I did notice is that the binding posts on the left speaker are loose. Looses as in the posts is about to fall off the speaker. When I rattlle it, the tweeter cuts out.

Case solved right? Nope, the other speaker makes that terrible sound on vocals.

I'll look for some editing software where I can cut out the offending parts of songs and put it on my website. I'll let you know when it is up.

Oh, the best I could describe it is two peices of sandpaper being rubbed together briefly.

Thanks,

Jay Kickliter

[DrWho]

The old CD player in my computer had a problem with

the 44Khz beating against the switching power supply in the computed

and making vshhhht sounds on louder sustained higher piched tones.

Very annoying.

I bought a new magic do-all CD/DVD/read/write piece and it's worse.

I replaced the supply and it's even worse.

I bought a new sound card, same problem.

I give up.

Back to the dedicated hi-fi for me.

How did you have the CD-ROM connected to the soundcard inside the

computer? I had similar problems with a PC that was built for me and

discovered that they used the analog connection. Switching over to the

digital cable solved the problem. (You would think it would just be

data being sent down the IDE, but that's not the case with "audio"

media...dunno why).

But even then, the windows kernel upsamples/downsamples everything

to 48kHz with

a very poor algorithm. If you want true hi-fi from a computer you need

to use an alternate playback method. ASIO seems to be the standard in

the pro world and there are many consumer cards that also support it.

The only problem with ASIO is there really isn't any free "music

playback" programs that work flawlessly with every soundcard. To

Windows, ASIO just looks like non-audio data being sent to the

soundcard so it doesn't bother touching it. The annoying part about all

this is that all the drivers I've come across written for Unix all

resample to 48kHz because it's easier to write.

[masterxela]

if its only during certain parts of certain recordings, can't we rule the speakers out?

do a sine wave sweep with nch tone generator or equivalent, if theres a problem frequency that'll find it

[Jay S.]

I posted a clip from Damien Rice's song Eskimo. It's in Apple Lossless format. Once it starts to go loud it clips a lot on my system.

http://idisk.mac.com/jay.kickliter-Public

If anyone is set up to play Apple Lossles through their system, I'd appreciate if they could play this clip so I can rule out my source material as the problem.

thanks,

Jay