How loud are you pushing them? With the other speakers off you may be pushing them louder than you realize, since there is no reference to use to balance the sound. Are you sure your crossovers are actually on? How does that song sound with a pair of headphones? What is the source, original CD, lossless file, streaming service, ****ty bootleg file?

 

How loud are you pushing them? With the other speakers off you may be pushing them louder than you realize, since there is no reference to use to balance the sound. Are you sure your crossovers are actually on? How does that song sound with a pair of headphones? What is the source, original CD, lossless file, streaming service, ****ty bootleg file?

it's on spotify.

this is a 6 month long question that has prevented me from playing this song art high volumes because i can't understand it.
nothing is askew in my signal chain or setup.
i turned off the low end speakers just to trouble shoot and hear the song once more.

after reading about another user who is experiencing distortion and sounds that probably shouldnt be paying in their tweeters.

it can be heard at all volumes.
and if your curious what happens when the sub is off, it's already off.

ive high passed my tweeters @13khz and still heard the same effect

I can hear it on my phones speaker as well as
My headphones on youtube as well.
but the difference is it doesnt sound as bad as it does on my tweeters.
I still hear the rumble/buzz that corresponds with the bassline. the same sound effect you would hear if you were to play frequencies, that are too low for small speakers.

i know that some songs are intentionaly clipping. but the sound effect makes no sense. and this particular song seems to have a very pronounced bassline.

the question is what is it that im hearing. Is it possible that this song and songs in general can be produced in ways that can be damaging to speakers, or failures/hiccups in a signal chain?

 

What speakers are you using?

 

I haven't heard this song (I'm really not a Drake fan). But I used to work for a top 40 radio station. The mastering process on most modern music (top 40 music in particular) is absolutely brutal. Everything has severe amounts of audio compression, limiting and clipping. Like tons of clipping. That heavy limiting and clipping creates intermodulation distortion, so you may be hearing the bass notes creating intermod distortion and other clipping artifacts up in the treble range on your tweeters. I've noticed many top 40 songs with female vocalists where she sounds like she's gargling sand while singing, due to all of the clipping and bass notes intermod distorting the vocal.

What's worse is there's no dynamics on kick and snare anymore. Old rap/hip-hop you can crank it and get slammed in the chest by the kick. New rap is just sine waves, no kick, no dynamics. All of this crap just to make things sound as loud as possible on tiny phone or bluetooth speakers.

My first experience with bad mastering clipping was the Red Hot Chili Pepper's Californication album back in '99. I couldn't understand why that album was so distorted on my truck's system (not good distortion), while everything else sounded fine. Years and years later I discovered it was clipping-distortion.

I'm a hobby music lover, musician, recording engineer and producer. These recording/mastering processes need to die in a fire. We stereo dorks go through so much effort to make sure nothing in our signal chain is clipping, yet the music is clipped on-purpose from the get go.

Ok I'm sorry, old man rant over...

 

You only hear this on one song? So in testing for this one song you are cutting the midbass and sub completely off and then turning it up? If the crossover is on correctly, it sounds like you are turning it up to the clipping point for the tweets. You have done the same testing proceedure with other songs and not experienced the same issue?