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Sibilance in recordings: your experience the same?

I have just finished a remodeling project and added new 20amp lines to feed my system. Rather suddenly I became annoyed with excessive sibilance on Patricia Barber's Mythologies recording (CD). I had never noticed this before. I looked at my system configuration and could find no obvious changes in the pre/post-remodeling arrangement of my power cords and ICs, so I have to ask if others have had the same experience with this recording. While I'm at it, are there other recordings, say, in the female singer/songwriter genre with inherently excessive sibilance? The really annoying thing about sibilance is once you hear it, YOU REALLY HEAR IT!
128x128mdrummer01
rja's avatar
rja
2,371 posts
 
Sibilance drives me nuts, I can't stand it. For me it's one of the worst qualities in audio. Unfortunately, if it's on the CD anything in the chain can make it worse. It's one of the qualities I check first in any auditioning, be it a cable, component, outlet, whatever. If it makes sibilance worse; end of story for me. No other qualities can compensate.
cerrot's avatar
cerrot
1,700 posts
 
Sibliance on cd can be from an unbroken player. I have experienced it. My X03SE was Sibliance City for 500 hours. Now, pure bliss.
psacanli
535 posts
 
Check the absolute polarity of your ac to start.
psacanli
535 posts
 
Ensure you have isolation & conditioning for your CD player.
Dedicated lines do nothing for those items.
lrsky
1,118 posts
 
Sibilance, to me is the most annoying of virtually all system flaws. I remember my first foray into High End audio was disappointing almost entirely, because there was virtually no female singer who didn't sizzzzzle into the mic, or so I thought.
Extended HF, with no regard to interconnects, speaker cables, GOOD solid state, (which back then was an oxymoron), a cart for the table which could actually track correctly. That sibilance unearthed a vast multitude of problems.
"What's New", by Linda Ronstat was such a dissapointment for a long time because of this. The music, I loved, the rendition of her voice, not so much.
They obviously peaked her voice in the upper ranges; why, to give it more 'presence' I suppose.
There is a device which produces 'tube like' distortions, known as, and I'm no doubt wrong on this, "Aphex Aural Exciter", which introduces tube like distortions onto the recordings. Many female vocalists, Barbara Streisand being, at least at one time, the most visible, LOVE this effect.
In designing some speakers, one of my principal goals was to have NO SIBILANCE ADDED. Sure some recordings sound that way, but a speaker with just a few db of spike in the upper regions, and in the wrong bandwidth, can send most of us running from the room. Again, and I've said it before, a good theology for speaker designers, could be "The best tweeter I ever heard, I didn't."
This should be viewed as, HF's sound electrostatic, not 'dome'.
I'd personally rather have a slight roll off than that nails on the chalkboard sibilance.

"I'll talk, I'll talk, God, please make them stopppp!!!!!!"
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