Hi,
I just listened to the Billy Joel link, and it's sibilant, that's for sure. It's also a live concert and I wonder if the engineer upped the EQ on his vocal mike for intelligibility.
It's annoying, because the miking of the other instruments seems quite good--the piano is fine, likewise the bass and the guitars.
Lots of vocal mikes have a switch that will put a big bump--up to 6 dB--in the sibilance region.
But I have some CDs that are even worse on the vocals than the Billy Joel example. If memory serves, there was an early Donald Fagen release--the CD booklet showed him at an old studio microphone, an RCA, I think. It was released very early in the CD era and the sibilance is truly awful. Was it called "Nightfly"? I played it once and never listened again.
Alan
