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My battle with sibilance.

At the minimum sibilance is annoying to me. Its only present on a small percentage of my records. However today I wanted to see if I could improve it. The song in question is Men at Work's "Down Under". The cartridge is an Ortofon Cadenza Bronze retipped by Soundsmith. I went through a lot of the protocols for abating annoying sibilance.
1.My anti skate was not optimally set so I thought and I adjusted to less using a dead spot on a test record. I know some people don't agree with this. I tried Soundsmiths method but until I see a video I won't understand it.
2. I adjusted my VTA to at least 20 degrees. I realized it was off. It was set at 12-15 degrees. I know the Shibata stylus is sensitive to VTA.
3. I checked the VTF and it was set at the manufacturers suggestion at 2.5 grams. Which is dead in the middle of 2.3 to 2.7. I adjusted to 2.62. A lot of people think the higher range is optimum.
3. I made sure my stylus was absolutely clean.
Guess what? After all this, the sibilance was less but still there. As a check I listened to the song in streaming and it was in the recording!!! However not as bad as my record before my TT adjustments. So I'm happy now my TT might sound better on other recordings. Anyway I hope my fellow members here have had some success on sibilance and maybe some will benefit from what I did.

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lewm
13,296 posts
 
Mijo, Have you noticed that you’ve backed off your original claim that Wilson deliberately engineered a “Gundry Dip” into their speaker’s response (without saying which of their many very different speakers you were talking about).  And that along the way you’ve admitted that the only close to meaningful measure of speaker response has to be done in an anechoic chamber, which you probably did not use in making your own private assessment. No one is saying that a given speaker may not have a dip in its midrange response, due to any number of different factors. So we can let the subject die a natural death.
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mijostyn
8,570 posts
 
@lewm , Yes, that may have been a bit pretentious. However the response of the speaker being what it was does lead one to wonder. As I said before I doubt Wilson did things by mistake although it might have been an end they were happy with. Just by listening it is going to make a more natural sounding speaker at lower volumes and it may have been by listening that they arrived at this result. Wilson was a young company at the time and certainly did not have the resources they have now. 
As for the anechoic chamber, quite right. You can get a feel for a speaker's behavior doing near field measurements. The largest errors are going to be in the bass. I do believe there are now computer programs that with impulse testing can ignore reflections and give a pretty accurate curve without an anechoic chamber. I certainly do not have one.  

This was not my own idea. I had heard manufacturers did this for two reasons, to lower sibilance and to make the speaker more natural sounding at lower levels. Both are very true and can be easily demonstrated. 

@rauliruegas , Sibilance and distortion are two very different problems with different solutions. Distortion might sort of sound like sibilance but it is not. 
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rauliruegas
13,106 posts
 
@mijostyn : "  As I said before I doubt Wilson did things by mistake.."

only your doubt because the dip exist by the crossover frequency in that range. Normally the midrange/tweeter crossover goes from 2.5khz to around 4khz. There is no mistakes D. Wilson was an expert for all his audio experiences through his life .

Btw, yes sibilance is not a defined distortion as THD or IMD but at the end several developed system kind of distortions can accentuate the sibiliance issue, this is what happened with the OP that after to fix the cartridge/tonearm  the sibilance sound does not disappears but gone way lower and that's too my first hand experiences about.

R.


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