Sibilance how do I get rid of it?

Ezmerelda, Rives, and Esun are correct. You have a good system in a terrible room. Nothing you do to the system will be correctly quantifiable or justifiable before you address the room. A $200,000 system would probably exhibit the same problem in that room. Do a simple experiment: With a helper or two, try to carry on an intelligible conversation across your listening room for a while, separated by a distance about equal to your listening distance. Then relocate to your living room and try it again. Then ask yourself whether you may have experienced a reduction in effort and an increase in comprehension once you and your party moved out of the basement. Nothing in your whole system, other than the source material, has a greater influence on what you hear than the room. Start there, and you'll likely end there. Best of luck, keep us apprised!

I don't get it. 40+ odd posts later, and you guys are still going at it over the AC issue. Don't get me wrong, I do believe, based on experience, that cleaner power can = cleaner transients. And of course, no one can get rid of sibilance embedded in a recording. BUT THIS POOR FELLOW IS LISTENING IN A 26' X 14' UNCARPETED BASEMENT. HE HAS A SEVERE AFFLICTION OF FLUTTER ECHO, A PHENOMENON WHICH ANY PRO SOUND REINFORCEMENT OR STUDIO PROFESSIONAL CAN TELL YOU IS GREATLY EXCITED BY SIBILANTS, MAKING THEM SOUND WILDLY EXAGERATED. Attending to the AC or whatever else is all well and fine, AFTER TAKING CARE OF THE ROOM, FOR THE EMINENTLY SIMPLE REASON THAT HE WON'T BE ABLE TO FULLY BENEFIT FROM, OR MAYBE EVEN HEAR AT ALL, THESE OTHER IMPROVEMENTS IN HIS ROOM AS IT IS. Debate it all you like, but that's the honest truth, Ruth. (IMHO, natch! :-)

Stenho, the larger the room past a certain point, the more the delayed soundfield is percieved as a pleasant reverb (in circumstances such as a choir in cathedral), or possibly a discrete echo. It's the delay timing and the number of repeats, among other things, that determines how the soundfield will be perceived, so it isn't a necessarily case of the bigger the room, the worse the effect, at least as far as sibilants go. I don't claim to be an expert (although we have already heard in this thread from one who presumably is - Rives), but I am a musician who has played live in many different spaces and logged a fair amount of studio time, both as a player and a producer, so I have had regular contact with the professionals I mention, in addition to having read books that touch on this subject. The flutter echo will be set up in a room not too large, with parallel hard surfaces and little damping. The short delay time will tend to fold the perceived effect into the initial event, and not be perceived as separate unless one was to stop the music short. You are correct that it will affect all the sounds, not just sibilants, but sibilants are by definition loud transients (which is why they will distort a mic preamp before throat tones, causing pops or hisses which are indicative of clipping), and these will appear to the listener to 'jump out' and smear more noticeably than non-transient sounds. Another factor is that in a typical, more damped environment, it's the higher frequency sounds that are most absorbed, recreating the intended balance of the sound mix, which was made in a damped mixing studio. When replayed in an undamped space, the parts of the music containing proportionally larger HF content (such as transients) will become exagerated in balance. As far as the example of unfurnished homes goes (which of course may contain the right sized rooms to compare with Braab8's problem), I am in these frequently as part of my work, and I have to disagree - I find conversational intelligibility to be greatly affected by such an environment. [I'll even give you a recorded musical example analogous to what I'm talking about: Play (if you have it) the The Beatles' version of Carl Perkins' "Everybody's Tryin' To Be My Baby"; an artificial tape-delay flutter echo has been applied to George Harrison's vocal track, and listen to what happens to the sibilant 'T's and 'S's as he sings the title line in the choruses.] Again, I stress that I am not trying to cast doubt on anything said above in this thread, but just to point out that in all probability those other potential culprits will be having a lot of their possible effects swamped by that of this room in its current state. In other words, had Braab8's system been set up in a carpeted furnished living room instead, we probably wouldn't be having this debate right now.

Stenho - Not to prolong an agreement to disagree (or at least have a different take), but how far away did you stand from the other person talking when you made your observations? You would have had to be far enough away for the room sound to increase its percentage of the perceived total relative to the direct sound in order to experience a degradation in intelligibility - and also don't forget that there was the visual cue of watching the other person speak.