My battle with sibilance.

I mostly stalk the halls of this forum, but felt like adding my experience here. 

My previous cartridges from Sumiko and Ortofon all had sibilance issues. I noted this to be jarringly obvious on several LPs. The most obvious being a few old Tom Waits pressings and a few of the Nick Cave reissues that came out a few years ago. At some point I just stopped listening to those albums via vinyl and went with the digital version instead. 

About two years back my Sumiko EVO-III cantilever busted for some reason. My friend who owns a hi-fi shop recommended Hana. I picked up the EH. It was great, but still had sibilance issues on the same records, although slightly less. Then the pandemic happened. I decided to give my EH to friend of mine and picked up the MH. Told myself a while back I would never spend more than $500 on a cartridge, but I figured I'd give it a try. I sent my turntable to my friend (he's been setting up cartridges and turntables for decades) and installed the MH. Got my turntable back and my sibilance issues were 99% gone. 

I'm not well versed in all the technical aspects of this hobby so I'm not 100% sure why the MH cured my problems. I know it's a different tip and cantilever than my past cartridges. I honestly don't really care why it worked. Just happy it did. 

Anyway, this has been my experience. I'm not saying a $1200 cartridge will work for everyone, but it certainly worked for me and my system*.

As another note, Perfect Vinyl Forever has what they call the Archival 3.0 cleaning service. That's made a huge difference in sound quality issues I've had on new and old vinyl alike. 

*Pro-Ject "The Classic", Moon ACE, Vandersteen VLR CTs, REL T9, Audioquest (AQ) Niagara 1200, AQ Monsoon AC cables, AQ Meteor speaker cables. 

One should not have sibilance with any good quality phono set up properly unless of course it is on the recording which can be a thing.  
FWIW I have none. Zero nada sibilance with the Denon dl103r in my rig. Been that way for years. Historically the most common cause For sibilance I’ve found over the years is a worn stylus followed by a bad setup resulting in poor tracking.

Sorry to resurrect this thread, but tonight I am reminded of a particularly difficult album to track...without sibilance.

Norah Jones, "Not Too Late"

From the very first song, there is a lot of 'sss' to navigate.  This could be attributed to a 'hot' recording, but if you can get a phono cartridge dialed-in, it can sound wonderful.  For me, it required a combination of high-quality, low-mass cantilever/stylus, along with very exact cartridge alignment (including VTA and azimuth) in order to get a satisfactory result with this album.

jdjohn, sibilance and miss tracking distortion are two separate problems.
Even the best, perfectly maintained systems can have recording induced sibilance. Miss tracking distortion certainly sounds terrible and can be do to bad styli and cartridges but it is not sibilance even though it makes you squint just as bad. The easiest response to sibilance is just to turn the volume down a little. This will not get rid of miss tracking.

Mijostyn, you cannot assess whether any speaker has a deliberate gundry dip incorporated into the crossover simply by measuring the response of the speaker, because there are natural dips that occur in association with a crossover from one Driver to another. So you can not know whether that is an incidental artifact of the crossover or a deliberate dip. Further, the very benefit of a loudness control is that by turning the control one way or the other you are adjusting the level of the compensation for the Fletcher Munson curve. Because the degree of loss of sensitivity to bass and treble frequencies relative to midrange varies with sound pressure levels, the adjustability of a loudness control affords much more flexibility  than incorporating a fixed Gundry dip into the crossover network. Did you actually inquire whether  Wilson incorporates a gundry  dip into their crossover networks?