Variaudio heavily distorting sibilance beyond actual SS-es

I always thought harsh S/T/D/F/Z were a result of compression. I normally remove variaudio from these sounds but they still remain harsh. S would sound like SH. Z like zh. ph like PHSH etc

Today I found out that if I remove a moment before and after these sibilant forms (half to a second) from a clean subsequent sound they become clear like original sounds.

Something about the way variaudio algorhythm works I guess. A room for improvement.

This is something I started noticing I think in Cubase 10. When editing a vocal, I used to select the whole performance and tighten the notes a bit with the quantize pitch slider before listening through for specific notes. My esses would always sound distorted when mixing and it always bugged me. I thought for a while it was the mic I was using and was seriously thinking my mic was messed up somehow. Recently, when editing a vocal and working on a specific section, I heard a clear S sibilance a few times then did my usual quantizing and then heard the distortion after! I then realized the issue was definitely with variaudio.

Because of this, my workflow now is to NOT use the quantize pitch function and just tweak specific words as needed and that seems to not cause the sibilance distortion.

That’s how I’m going to use it from now on.

Unfortunately I have noticed this issue also.
It would be nice if vari audio would work without messing up the sound of the ss’s!