Sibilance on Eva Cassady Songbird S&P LP among others

Isn't that an indication that greater expense might not be the solution?. I don't know, i just listened to Nowhere Man(UK mono Y&B), not the best condition, but other than the first 'sitting' there is no really discernable sibilance i can hear.

My own experience - I had a Rega P2 with a very modest MM Goldring Elektra, and certain modern LPs i had were very sibilant sounding. I played the same record(s) on my then newly bought SL-1200mk2, with the same model of cartridge, and the grating sibilance i heard was no longer apparent.

Might it be the cartridge?, here are a couple of posts from AA on someones experience/impression of it.........
AudioAsylum Post 1

AudioAsylum Post 2

I don't have the answers for you, i'm just offering my own experiences and thoughts here, for what it's worth.

 

Interesting reading Larpy- The DCC Paul Simon Sibilence I posted about sounds like the singer, and not the stereo. No image changes or anything like that. I will have to try it on a friends system as others have mentioned. I have a large LP collection, and this is the first time Ive noticed this. Many are DCCs, MOFIs, Classics, Sheffields etc. Im not ready to dump my $800 Grado just yet, I will have to do some more investigation first, which may include another pressing.

 

Wow, on a hunch I did a search about sibilance on A HARD DAY'S NIGHT and found this thread...quite a relief as this was driving me nuts, thinking it was still a problem with my system, but glad it's not. I have tweaked and tweaked trying to minimize the sibliance on my one-box pressing of this record prior to making a needle drop. Everything people say here rings so true to me - you can with proper adjustment minimize the number of places wher the sibilance is really intrusive on tunes like "Happy Just to Dance..." and "And I Love Her," and you can get rid of the raspy quality in those places where you still hear it, but no way can you get rid of all of it. It's "built in."

Forget those stupid explicit lyrics "parental advisory" labels - there should intead be "gratuitous sibilance" stickers on LPs with this problem; let's deal with the real IMPORTANT societal issues!

 

But aren't "s" sounds like in the word "snake" or "sure" hard to reproduce on vinyl, meaning that's just the nature of records and a lot of records will have this problem? Maybe this sibilance sound was cut into the record, stamper and not the cartridge one is using?

 

Well, yes and no.

I've seen Steve comment on this before, you might do a search, but here's my novice's effort to explain...when you hear what sounds like sibilance, it MIGHT actually be cartridge mistracking...so you need to check that out and make sure that it isn't your rig. Ways to do that:

1) Adjust everything as carefully as you can on your rig, especially azimuth and antiskating, but it's all important - tracking weight, overhang, etc. While I don't think test records are an end in doing this, I personally found using one really, really helpful in troubleshooting where my problems were that needed adjusting and getting the set-up "roughed in," so that it just took a little more tweaking with actual music to get things just right. After doing this, what I initially thought was sibilance from the cutting or recording on some vinyl titles was actually cart mistracking. It's only a very smaller number of tracks now that I hear sibilance on and, in doing searches here, it seems most of those are tracks that almost everyone hears sibilance on, regardless of system, expertise in cart set up, etc. I find it hard to tell source sibilance apart from subtle mistracking (as opposed to gross breaking up) sometimes myself - easier after the fact when you adjust stuff and it disappears! - but if I had to generalize I'd say that mistracking is going to sound like a fuzzier, on the edge of breaking up type of sound - but I think it's hard to tell for us with merely mortal ears

2) Check out sibliance issues on a particular title with other people who have the same gear as you and with people who have better gear. If the folks with better gear don't hear it, it may very well be that your system simply doesn't track those hard-to-track passages on some records as well as it could. One thing I'm finding is that some carts can sound really excellent in other aspects but suffer from a tendency to mistrack in passages with a lot of high-end information...and some are INCREDIBLY sensitive to small changes in adjustment either creating or eliminating mistracking problems. A true razor's edge kind of thing.

3) Compare the record with a CD version of the music (if it's not on the CD then it's harder to blame the original recording as the culprit at least)

All this has worked for me so far, but I'm still learning.