Sibilance in recordings: your experience the same?

Actually sibilance is a REAL microphone artifact which is really on the recording. Eliminating it is best done by prevention. After that any strategy which limits it is doing so by smearing or attenuating the signal. This can be more pleasant to listen to but not because it's "correcting" the signal. Choosing cables or anything else which universally eliminates it may not always be a good thing. Tube based systems exhibit less sibilance than S.S. and the reason for that was the subject of a lively debate sometime ago in a TAS roundtable discussion. It was postulated ( but without uniform agreement) that tubes might gently smear the signal which is what makes them so " musical". My advice is to buy better recordings and to have tubes somewhere in the preamp or output stage of a cd player to gently minimize the remainder.

Without any scientific data to support this, I would say that, while I agree that sibilance is a real artifact, that it's not limited to simply microphones. The reason I question this is, why does it manifest primarily and while not exclusively, at least mostly in vocal recordings.
Massed strings, which because of the focus of thier collective bandwith, would seem to be very prone to this same effect, yet I don't find it in the same amounts.
That, plus as I listen to the remakes of Winston Ma's works, recordings which sound so unbelieveably sibilant in thier original forms, sound extraordinarily less so after he performs his 'magic'. Winston told me personally, that his process is one of (of course many more things than this and I am simplifying) removing layer after layer of noise within the recording.
The harmonics of say a female voice, an octave, two, and three above the dominant in that female voice reside in the 1khz, 2kz, 4khz frequency bandwidth. This, not too coincidentally is spread over the range of many mid to HF driver crossovers.
With time and phase 'smear' in this region, coupled with great amounts of noise in SOME recordings the result is a heightened distortion level.
As to tubes smearing this information, I don't think that's it. Tubes, by most, even solid state designers are by consensus thought to have better low level resolution. That greater resolution may simply give more information over the entire spectrum allowing for a fuller more complete therefore less sibilant sound.
I offer up the one theory, crossover issues in dynamics, as one thought after living with the Sound Labs for quite a while and not having anywhere near the same level of sibilance introduced. Also, the Quads, and even the Maggies full panel units. None of these panels, to my ear share in these sibiant issues to nearly the same degree.
This group of theories has, again, no proof offered, and may be completely wrong. But given hundreds of hours, make that thousands, of listening, it seems that some or all of these may contribute to the annoying artificacts we call sibilance.

Sibilance is "always" much more obvious when the system is not well set up overall, including AC conditioning, however-even in a perfectly set up system if the disc played is not in correct phase sibilance will be an issue. This is the reason I would no longer consider a system where I could not change the phase in the source(CD plyer) or preamp, preferably the pre.
Since records have the same phase problems I have a Spectral preamp which provides phase switching for any source-and does so in a completely transparent manner.
This phase problem will continue to be a factor for downloaded music so a great preamp with this feature will be worthwhile for a very long time to come for serious listeners-imho.

Lrsky - Yes I don't think it purely a microphone artifact.I don't know if it's magic but lots of people use de- essers to limit sibilance during the recording process. Psacanli - Unfortunately it's common that people don't pay attention to phase during the recording process. I would not say ,however, that sibilance is always more obvious in improperly set up systems unless you are defining "properly set up" as hearing less sibilance exclusively. In fact, I can imagine cases where just the opposite is true. If an engineer has not made an attempt to minimize it and it ends up 'on the disc' a system which uniformly reduces your hearing it is robbing you of detail which would not be considered a "properly set up system" for someone who values detail above " musicality"

Aldavis,

Nice post. I'd agree that if you have an excellent system then a small portion of your collection will have a little too much sibilance (that is because not all studios are equipped with decent gear - many speakers have a midrange scoop for example to make them sound pleasant and laid back - even in studios)