I'll play devil's advocate just this once.

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1. I'm certainly willing to believe bad mic/transmission problems, whatever, but

then I feel this was a sound I don't normally hear, despite hearing many video clips and podcasts and Teams/zoom meetings, etc.

More common with the 's' sound is more of a distortion/fry/static sound. This sounded more like a proper lisp, an unvoiced 'th' rather than the usual problems.


I wonder if the twitter/x voice technology has some kind of lossy compression that distorts the natural 's' sound? But again, why don't I hear this elsewhere?