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Originally Posted by Knightingale /img/forum/go_quote.gif
wow. that's some deep technical philosophical and psychological writings.
i've been listening to the er4s unamped and i hear some annoying sibilance.
any advice on how to reduce or terminate the sssssssssss?
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Do you get the same sibilance when the headphone is amped?
Sibilance is a little like nausea. Several different causes can have the same effect. Sibilance is part of what we hear (even if we tune it out). In recording and broadcast, it poses a challenge because the equipment designed to accurately produce high frequencies naturally picks up this sound, which has more body to it (and a slower rate of decay). The attempt to emphasize HF ends up reproducing the sibilance as well.
Sibilance is also the result of poor equipment or poorly adjusted equipment. If you've got too rich a mix of HF, you're going to get more sibilance than you bargained for. If you've got equipment overemphasizing certain frequencies, with sharp spikes and troughs, you can also get more sibilance. There's plenty of equipment that poorly reproduces the bass or mids, so the attempt to crank it up while drive a nail through your skull. There are also cheap component parts, with poor accuracy, so again, you get sibilance issues galore.
To bottle the ends, you could have a sibilant recording, a sibilant player or a sibilant amp - if not all three.
When it comes to earphones, sibilance is the result of two factors: driver sibilance and ear-canal acoustics. Small wide-range drivers may overly produce HF or underproduce LF. Either way, you may end up with a mix that leans toward the HF - giving you excess sibilance. The ear canal is also an acoustical environment that favors sibilance. Some creatures - like s-s-snakes - are sensitive to LF, which they "hear" through their bellies. I suppose, for a snake, that's important because the snake's survival depends on its ability to hear its dinner taking a walk. We, on the other hand, are highly sensitive to mids and HF, which probably gave our ancestors a different set of cues. We don't crawl around on our stomachs so our awareness - of both breakfast and predators - depended on a different set of frequencies, from a different vantage point. What were our ancestors listening for? Movements in the grass? The snapping of twigs?
But I digress. The point is that this pair of sound horns, strapped to the sides of our skulls, along with the long ear canals, may not be as far-ranging as that of some animals, but its earliest use was geared toward survival, not pleasure. It doesn't matter that the sounds it picked up were less than euphonic. What mattered was its efficiency. Its job was to pick up as much as it could; the brain developed a kind of filter for tuning out what it didn't need. This leaves the ear and ear canal sensitive to sounds we pipe right in. The proximity of the sound, along with the cupping design of the ear and ear canal, make it very easy to get overwhelmed by the HF. For that reason, earphone drivers are designed to have an HF roll-off. Even then, the drivers need a filter to avoid overwhelming the ear, which is already more than tuned to these sounds.
Even custom IEMs, with their claim to employing integrated passive crossovers, use filters to attenuate the HF. If the filter is inadequate or damaged, you'll get sibilance. What's more, the ER4S uses higher impedence, which enhances the HF. Chances are, you have a damaged filter (Ety filters are non-reusable). The alternative is to use a different kind of filter, which will change the performance of your phones, but by simply blocking out more HF.
