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Which speakers are the brightest?

I do wonder if what many describe as bright or harsh are actually the bass/mid drivers breaking up/crossed over badly rather than the tweeters ...
 
drummerman said:
I do wonder if what many describe as bright or harsh are actually the bass/mid drivers breaking up/crossed over badly rather than the tweeters ...
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Or a peak at tweeter resonance because of a dodgy xover design. This may not break the response much to still cause problems.
 
This may be an age thing ? I first became interested in hifi in my teens and lusted after Spendor BC1s, Gale 401s and Ditton 44s. Maybe that's my benchmark and I've not adapted to the greater detail (brightness) ?

I hear the extra brightness less well now !
 
When I bought my first real hi fi the dealer played me a pair of mission or Cyrus speakers, had a headache after the dem. I settled on a pair of Castle Durhams in the end.

I do find as I get older I do require a bit more bite or brightness in the treble dept.
 
As another person said, the German speakers, Cantons, MB Quarts, etc. often sound bright. I've thought that certain B&Ws and Klipsch speakers sound bright as well.
 
My friend has a pair of Cantons, they make my teeth itch. I had a pair of focal 1038s for about a week, that's as much as I could take.
 
ThELiZ said:
So interesting how people hear things differently. I had a pair of tiny dancers and didn't find them bright at all. I hate bright speakers. I was very fond of them and only got rid of them as they were too big and bassy for my room.
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Some speakers when not properly driven can sound awful. With good quality amplification the exact same speakers may sound great.

The listening room is naturally very important too.
 
Vinyl Giraffe said:
As another person said, the German speakers, Cantons, MB Quarts, etc. often sound bright. I've thought that certain B&Ws and Klipsch speakers sound bright as well.
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Klipsch, especially vintage ones are very easy to get to sound horrendous, and some, e.g. the Heresy are often misunderstood even to this day (they need to sit on the floor against a wall or in a corner, never on stands!). These are all vintage tube-era designs and tend to sound very wrong on highly damped solid state IME. They are also crazy efficient so will find the switching distortion, noise etc in a lot of electronics. (I've owned Heresys and currently have La Scalas in my TV system).
 
Julf said:
You could simply get an amp with tone controls...
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No real need if you have the right kit in the first place. I just sent the focals back, realised that I was still completely happy with the speakers I'd been using for several years and saved myself over £5k. ;)
 
Quad Electrostatics, when the humidity gets too high and the lights are low.

The lightning effects are really bright...
 
Depends on what you mean by bright, raised extreme treble >10kHz or presence region 4~6kHz where sibilance lives
 
Minio said:
I'm not sure if being bright is a bad thing for everyone considering that personal hearing chacteristics vary among people of different ages, for example.
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This doesn't make any sense to me. Even if you have hearing loss, you still use the same ears to hear the real world as you do for reproduced music, so an overly-bright presentation won't sound more real.
 
When playing a frequency sweep from 10Hz to 20KHz, I noticed that I cannot hear frequency around 16KHz while somewhere 17KHz onwards becomes audible again until some where near 18KHz to 19KHz where it becomes too soft to hear.

Maybe there are others like me that can't hear certain high frequencies.
 
cstanpfm said:
When playing a frequency sweep from 10Hz to 20KHz, I noticed that I cannot hear frequency around 16KHz while somewhere 17KHz onwards becomes audible again until some where near 18KHz to 19KHz where it becomes too soft to hear.
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Notches happen, often from industrial exposure, but it could be the speaker you are using having a notch or going into break up at 17kHz and generating sub-harmonics
 
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