So one of my recent annoyances has been with sibilance on one of my favorite female vocalist albums from Dinah Washington.  



This album just takes me back to a time when young and listening to music at my uncle’s tailor shop when I worked as a kid.  It was getting to the point where I did t even want to listen to the album anymore. The Esses and the zees were driving me nuts!  Maybe this album was more excessive, but either way once you hear it….it’s hard to unhear.  

Well….Today was a period of enlightenment. I had just received this album on vinyl as part of a backorder.  To my surprise the sibilance is not present on vinyl.  This leads me to believe that it was either never present, and introduced on the digital conversion, or just that the vinyl album by its analog nature just does not present itself where it pronounced and harsh.

Does anyone else have a similar experience and/or care to share a technical answer for how the sibilance is attenuated…..or lack there of, in the digital conversation.

Hi Dom,
Sibilance has always been a distraction for me. That is the main reason I settled on single driver full range speakers. Adding timing issues which are inherent of muti driver crossover fixen gimmicks seem to create sibilance with recordings that seem to have been processed with enhanced vocals. This in turn adds more timing issues from the recording. Our ears and brain process this mishmash into sibilance. Your CD most likely was processed with sub par equipment. I have CDs like that. My two.

James…never really gave this much thought until I streamed this album.  At first I thought that maybe it was the lack of a pop filter addition in the digital realm during processing, but that is really meant for the plosives.  I could see how things like the cartridge setup, the pressings, and the tubes themselves play a role.  

John….I would have never made the connection with speaker crossovers and timing issues creating the environment for the presence of sibilance.  Very interesting.  I had a very interesting conversation with Ziggy about bypassing capacitors when I was modifying the caps on my Err’s.  He cautioned about incorporating a second bypass on my big Miflex caps.  He felt that could cause a phase issue on the top end, that we may not even hear. But when I was experimenting with the first and second bypass caps, I liked the sound more with the addition of that second bypass as opposed without it.  

Jack…I am curious as to what your findings are with your MFSL gold CD release of that album.  The only thing I didn’t play with was the settings on my ZRock2 when I was streaming that album.  Need to revisit that to see if it makes a difference. I’m betting that it may tame it somewhat, but I doubt it will eliminate it.  

Dom, I have multiple stepped bypasses everywhere, speakers, in amps, my DAC, and pre-boxes, and no sibilance on any digital albums I play. [I have not used vinyl for decades so can't speak to that]. But I have experimented a lot to find caps I like and that compliment one another based on my very particular need for all balances, and from that basis, I have also ruled out a lot more caps than I use.

Having explored a lot of bypass sequences of chosen caps, bypasses that are complimentary for all balances across the spectrum are critical for me toward making a good sounding system sound real.... to me quite a difference. In electronics, this could be a base bypass cap of .1 or so on a power supply cap, and the .1 bypassed by a .01, and that bypassed by a .001, or .0022. Or it could be a .1 with only a .01, or .0047, or .0033, or .0022. But most of the larger bypasses I use in electronics are Miflex copper and copper oil, and the small bypasses I most end up with in electronics are, not "spectacular" sounding, but pleasantly low key, naturally textured and resolving Mallory M150s...For speakers I also bypass tweeters and crossovers that have caps. Those I have worked on are not very complicated, but with the right caps, they sound pretty beautiful to me, not the same, but not unlike a good full range driver speaker.

Consistently, I find that good caps and bypassing can help solve weird sound things we associate with brightness, glare, grunge, hardness, sibilance, etc. By resolving all levels of speed and detail complexity more, there is just a lot more noticeably resolved fine information, making the space way more a part of the sounds, and the sounds more rich and complex... less concentrated and hard. At least the way I hear it, none of this works without all important good time balances, leaving very little discernible smearing of fine information. Everything starting and ending more completely and naturally, excellent timing, with excellent musical resolution, differentiate all aspects of fine detail, space and speeds more completely, smoothly, and complexly...also contributing to more immediacy and more impactful presentation. The easiest reads for me are more space/air, more complex textures, longer and more complex decays, and all this across the spectrum...

In context, I think it is important to consider that this is pretty specific stuff, but that it can be experienced with pretty broad variability depending on all else in a system/room. And there are a lot of generalizations in audio talk, many suggested as absolutes. But in such complex systems, once we get into decent sound like Decware can help us get, in my experience, little is absolute except perhaps that everything effects everything, including how improvements in some areas, can be notably compromised by weaker links in others.

So I agree with James that anything can contribute to issues like sibilance, including tube groupings that can emphasize upper midrange stuff in a just wrong way. But what I continue to find, is that if each thing.... each cable, each component, each tube, speakers, and with the room and system tuned to compliment one another... with every one of these tuned for optimal resolution and timing across the spectrum, problems can resolve.

I am trying a Eversolo T8, and not a fair comparison yet as it only has 15-20 hours on it. But playing 44.1/16 error corrected files from its internal drive, files I am used to playing with Amarra in my tricked out (old) Mac Mini (with an also obsolete super stripped down by-sound OS), the T8 sounds compelling and promising in intellectual ways, but at this point, not real to me. It is pretty resolving, harmonically relatively rich, and dynamic. But it is more concentrated in how it resolves, and notably slower and less dynamically complex than the Mini as a server. Still, density with decent textures and decays are pretty nice, implying promise with burnin, but the very fine information, space, and speeds are too concentrated and obvious so far compared to what I am used to. Sort of typical issues with new things, I am expecting this to improve with burn in, and also promising, the T8 is already revealing aspects of a great power supply and some of the musical revelation that allows. But  listening for very refined space, detail, timing and complexity across the spectrum, this hot new piece of gear is now notably less refined than my now pretty ancient server! I imagine/hope this might sort out with burn in, and once I find the right cables and setup for it. But the point is that it all starts with the front end of the front end, and in a resolving system, a "digital" server can in fact have a big impact on the sound... and like the rest, if it can't resolve things in pretty complete ways, that musical information just won't show up even if all else is good!

So to me, brightness and other sharp/irritating things are not necessarily from too much, and can be from too little. Who knows how many times I have said this, but I find that once things get really good, more resolution and spacial clarity, if done with care and attention to balances, can be resolvers of sonic issues that plague us audio heads as system/rooms start to grow more revealing. This, to me, means not choosing things to tune out the problems of a system/room... strong compensations having to be off-balance to balance off-balance systems... But more, fixing or losing things that do not help, and choosing things with great resolution and balances on their own. The more I explore, the more I find that all things contributing relatively equally, logarithmically better balances can show up... that "synergy" thing, while making it easier to further clarify without trauma.

Finally, if timing and resolution are even a little off anywhere, we feel and hear it as off. And if it is on, we hear more space, which is totally related to more fine detail... With more space, resolved musical information is more refined, and with better resolution, the space that helps reveal it is more refined. So I hear it as: less smearing and more resolution go together, allowing the fine "particles" of sounds to be discerned, which means there can be a lot more information, and all aspects of it coming and going correctly, musically, complexly, it can stop sounding like a good system, and become more of an awe inspiring musical experience.

All that said, I have some CDs from the early CD days that tend thin and hard in the remaster and I just can't listen to them... So many problems with the transition to such clarity and resolution possible with digital, and coming from master guys with decades of tuning from within the smooth natures of tape and vinyl, it seems to me it was a different language, and many of those old remasters just sound bad in a resolving system! On the other hand, lots of what I listen to are pretty good re-masters from early digitizing, a lot of them pretty simple and straight up recordings with good mics, gear and room!

So many variables!