I listened to various pronunciations on Forvo, Wiktionary and various dictionaries with audio files.
To my (untrained) ear it always sounds as if the "в" is silent and not pronounced at all.
That being said, the IPA is [fsʲɪɡˈda] and that suggests that there should be a distinct hard /f/ sound (like the letter ф) in the beginning. So, I guess that sound is just very subtle and therefore (almost) imperceptible.
When I pronounce the word, I omit the /f/ sound, because I can hardly pronounce the /f/ sound before /sʲ/. That is, surely, I can pronounce the letter there, but then it really is a very, very distinct and perceptible sound and it kinda sounds funny, and to my mind my pronunciation is closer to the pronunciation of a native speaker when I drop that letter.
Do native speakers, or those whose ears are trained to distinguish Russian sounds, perceive the /f/ sound in the beginning? Is it clearly distinguishable from a word that begins in "с" (e.g. сегмент)? And do you think you would notice when I omit the letter altogether, i.e. pronouncing it [sʲɪɡˈda]? Does someone have any experience on that?
And finally, how could I learn to pronounce it correctly?
Besides, I am a native speaker of German.