Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Stereo Sibilance - S's overstressed

Funny how everyone has an opinion, that is what makes this all fun. Personally, I demoed the 703's against my 60's in my brother in law's recording studio, and the 60's sounded more detailed and natural to me. I would never call them Harsh, Klipsch horn technology maybe, but Axiom, come on....

I have many Diana Krall CD's and DVD's. At one point I thought I was hearing Sibilance in DTS 6.1 mode, but after listening and watching carefully, it turned out being the drummers circular motion on the snare drum. That is how good the Axioms are in accuracy and detail.

my 2 cents.

I'm with you WID on this one, not an issue for me either with my 60's. It is not the speakers, that is for sure.

Randy

60's 150 350 4-Qs8's
Denon 2805
Toshiba DVD (soon to be Panny S97S)
Sanyo Z2 projector
Samsung HD receiver

I'm just jumping in here... been gone a long time.

As far as the apartment layout goes - I lived in a 1930's apartment in Houston that had a very similar layout, and I was told that the kitchen door to the hallway was a "servant's entrance." Don't know the veracity of that claim... but that building was definitely built in what would have been a very well-to-do area in that time. The kitchen also had a cool little mini-door for milk delivery that I thought was very cool.

As far as the sibilance...

I find that DOES have a lot to do with source.

CDs tend to be more sibilant than LPs for me, but I think that has to do more with the target audience of the mastering engineer.... CDs gotta sound great on all kinds of crap, but people who are buying LPs in this day and age are generally "paying more attention." This may have a lot more to do with the LP cult crowd than actualy quality of the medium... but I'm a pragmatist - I like the LP sound, in whatever bias it comes wrapped in.

Also - the performer/recording engineer can have a lot to do with it. I've got a friend in a major label rock band... and I know he just sings WAY too close to the microphone, and it's just really obvious THAT is the recording - the SSS'es are practically set fire!

I think that if you find a wide variety of source material to be too sibilant, or if you hear the sharpness as a mild "echo" - like an mp3 artifact - then it is probably your room or sensitivity to those frequencies. If it's really directional and isolated to a few things... well, that's just the recording (and life).

I hope I helped!

I had been using a "lesser brand" speaker for center for a while until I got an M3 to match the other M3s across the front, and one of the things that got me to go with the M3 was the sibilance I'd experienced with the lesser speaker-it absolutely sounded like fingernails on a blackboard!(ok, it's an exageration! but it was annoying!)

(The test case was the donkey in Shrek; makin' wafflesssss)

The M3s don't have it, and I don't miss it! Regardless of Where it comes from-sibilance is yucky!

Riffman,

This has nothing to do with the tweeter or driver materials in the M60s, M22ti's, etc. As JohnK and others have pointed out, it is room- and source-related.

The M60s, M80s, M22s etc. are very "linear" speakers--a smooth frequency response. If a microphone that has an upper-mid resonance is used for the pop/rock recording (very common; some performers request mikes with mid presence peaks), then the Axioms will reveal that.

An upper-midrange resonance can exist in any speaker, regardless of the tweeter or cone materials. I have some older speakers (I won't mention the brands) with silk-dome and cloth-dome tweeters that have a spiky resonance that makes them unlistenable (for me) with brass instruments, violins, or pop recordings that have any tendency to sibilance.

Regards,

It is great to have your opinion in this thread Alan, thanks a lot!! And it is true, I mostly listen to rock music (power metal more specifically), but I can hear sibilance in other recordings as well, such as Sade, Depeche Mode... I would really appreciate if you have any short-term solution advice for my case. You can find more information on my listening room, equipment, etc in this thread.

Does matter what speakers you use for power metal? JK
I heard some sibilance on my VP150 last night with Leonardo DiCrapio in the film "The Aviator". It was only his voice, off and on throughout the movie, during studio scenes - never outdoors.
This is not a common occurence on the VP150, from my experience. It was the source, plain and simple. Maybe a more constrained tweeter would have helped, but I'd also then be missing stuff I'd like to hear.
In your case, aside from scrapping the metal, maybe resistors on the tweeters would help. 30 day return? Good luck.

Hi Nowave,

Yes, you are right. All the older co-op apartment buildings in New York, including my own, have a servant's entrance. Typically it opens from the kitchen into a back stairwell.

CD is a more linear medium (no roll-off in high-frequency response) so it exposes aberrations in microphones, errors in EQ or engineering. High frequencies on many LPs are usually 3 dB or more suppressed, so they are more forgiving of sibilant recordings.

That said, I have some older pop/rock (and classical) LPs in my collection that are sibilant. If those master tapes to are reissued on CD without being remastered, they can be truly awful.

Overall, analog tape recording and vinyl technology is more forgiving and less revealing of high-frequency screw-ups. There are technical reasons as well. Tapes can saturate with too much high-frequency signal and when the LPs are cut with exaggerated highs, a lot of cartridges wouldn't track the high-frequency grooves without disortion. This increases towards the center of the record, where the hi-frequency groove modulations are closer together ("pinch" distortion), hence the stylus has trouble negotiating the violent twists and turns of the groove. One of the older tests for tracking ability of phono cartridges was to play test LPs of high-energy recordings of triangles, bells, cymbals, etc. and listen for the tell-tale signs of the stylus "mistracking"--nasty sounds indeed.

Regards,

Mark, I noticed that sibilance in the Aviator as well, and my current center channel has the Vifa tweeter (silk, I believe), as do my mains. With various discs, I've experienced occasional sibilance with them as well.

It's just my opinion, but the higher a speaker's quality, the more revealing it is, and the more important becomes the quality of what's on that little disc that goes into your DVD/CD player. The better the speaker, the more it accurately reproduces what's on the disc. As long as there is no mixing and mastering standard to which each disc must be held, some discs are going to sound better than others.

Good to know, Jack. Thanks. I knew it wasn't the speaker.