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.

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"