Would like to know peoples thoughts and real world experiences with deessing and compression. I have heard/read opposing views. Some say if you heavily compress a vocal your trying to de-ess you will bring up the volume of the other frequencies making the s sounds less audible, others say by compressing the vocal you are bringing up the ss's along with everything else making them more audible. My own thoughts are I guess it all depends how loud [ not to the ear but in db terms ] the offending ss's are compared to the rest of the vocal. I would think if they were louder then compression may help by compressing them bringing the rest of the vocal up making the ss's less noticeable. However if the ss's are cutting through yet softer [ in db terms] compression may make them more noticeable by compressing the non-offending parts of the vocal and not the ss's. in case you have not noticed ss's drive me nuts. I've used several de-essers as well as multiband compression like Waves F6 to try and compress only the offending frequencies. Alas while I've been able to improve some situations there still seems to be no substitute for getting it right when you record it.