Valves, I think I'm starting to understand what the fuss is about.

[Clive]

I know what you mean. I also dislike sibilance (although I suspect you are more sensitive to this than me), it gives me a headache. As does nasally or quacky sounding upper midrange and/or harsh treble. I've usually found speakers are to blame for this. Some PA speakers are intolerable in this respect. I guess solid state amps will emphasise this further.

My speakers have a seperate soft dome midrange driver that covers almost the entire vocal range and I find this helps as there's no crossover distortion in that important frequency band. Speakers with a crossover point around 3KHz tend to fall down in this area. That's not something your Bastanis will suffer from though.

There are all sorts of ways of masking the effect, finding the source of it is important as masking isn't the best way. For sure it can be speakers, it's very often also CD players too - actually usually these are the worst culprits. As you say the Bastanis get around the xover are problem very well.

Sibilance annoys me the most when it invades the entire soundstage because it's totally over-blown. I don't get a headache but I do stop listening to music - which is probably why I don't get a headache!