There is a lot of confusion about sibilance and I've recently figured out why.
In the real world, "sibilance" is just the real normal natural sound that some singers make when pronouncing Ss and Ts. This is made more noticible through microphones and the way the microphone is handled. Some people use de-essers to remove this but I have the feeling a lot of engineers (and singers) prefer to leave them in because it's probably a little more natural sounding.
A couple of greatest hits CDs will demonstrate this easily. Bruce Dickinsons' Greatest Hits, released recently, is an excellent CD filled with some great exclusive material and a good cross sampling of his work, but it's filled with sibilance. Bruce is known to some as "the air siren" because of his high pitched wailing vocals and to say the least, he's an example of what people call a bright singer. In his solo work, I don't think any attempt to remove the sibilance was ever made.
By contract, Boston's greatest hits contains not one iota of sibilance on the exact same equipment. From what I'm told, Boston is pretty religious about using only analog equipment to record their albums and pays a bit more attention to getting the sound exact than other pop and rock musicians might. So, not only do they not have the ess-ing effect to begin with but they have less opportunity for that sound to get compressed in production.
When an audiophile (or a wannabe such as myself) uses the word "sibilance," we don't typically mean the natural kind. What we mean is a DIGITAL ARTIFACT produced by undersampling the frequencies that just so happen to contain those Ss and Ts. In a digital recording only so many bits are available to represent your music, so like any good engineer would, they concentrate those bits into the part most folks can hear. The result is that some of the upper frequencies are undersampled and instead of sounding like music, they sound like a raspy noise.
With more bandwidth, this artifact lessens. You barely hear it in SACD and out of it's considerably lessened out of my ART DI/O's 88.2 output. Dr. Jan Meier's Corda Analoguer attacks those particular frequencies and gives you the ability to set the filter to different tolerances. If you have a better source, such as SACD, you'll require less filtering. You'll also have to adjust for what you can hear.
Most people, I suspect, can't hear quite the frequencies that I can. My eyes aren't great and my sense of smell is nonexistant, so somehow I got left with a decent ability to hear--and this after having seen Metallica and Sepultura. So, I hear a bit more of that sibilance artifact than the average guy because the average guy just can't hear those frequencies.
What I would hypothesize is that the ear in which you hear the sibilance may be just slightly more accute than the other ear. As you age, the higher frequencies will drop out. This is the gods' way of showing mercy on men by letting them skate through their final years with their nagging wives on mute. It's normal to lose some of these highs and it doesn't mean you're going deaf in one ear. Contrary to popular belief, humans are not really symetrical. One eye is better than the other, one arm is shorter, one breast is bigger. Play with Photoshop sometime and you'll see just how funky we'd look if we were symetrical.
Don't panic. And carry a towel.
Kelly
