What is the obsession with "great audio" when transmitting?

[KQ9J]

Nothing worse than listening to the tinny scrunched-up audio that a lot of people seem to think is the way it is supposed to be. I have a naturally deep voice, use no equalization, and have some people tell me that the audio is too "bassy". What's happening is the rig is faithfully reproducing my voice, limited only by the transmit filter. Fortunately most operators tell me they love my audio.

A lot of people think narrow and tinny sounds good.  Yecch.

[W8JX]

Narrow is not good most of time but bassy/HiFi audio while it can sound good to many under Q5 conditions is far from ideal under more marginal conditions and can be hard to copy. I will avoid weaker signals that are bassy because of this.   

[W0BTU]

I just uploaded a rough draft of an article on this subject to http://www.w0btu.com/ssb_audio-weak_signal.html. Some of it is from this thread, but you may find the reference material and graphs there helpful.

[K9FON]

I have hears some ops that have so much crap hooked in line that they sound terrible! A few times ive wanted to tell the op he sounds like S*** but im a nice guy on the air! :-)

[KB0OXD]

I call it the Rush Limbaugh Syndrome. It is a compulsion, like many others we see that manifest in ham radio. However, sometimes these driven hobbyist invent advancements that are useful to the ham radio community as a whole. Voice processing is not all bad, within the parameters that produce improved intelligibility at the receiving end. Many manufacturers are now including such features in ham transceivers.  

How is that related to The Mother Of All Politically Conservative Talkers?  Sorry, but even though I'm a registered Democrat & religiously watch MSNBC, I fail to see the connection

What these amateur "broadcasters" don't realize is that their efforts may be limiting their range and at the end of their now shorter coverage area, they still sound like static. Their money would have been better spent installing an improved antenna system!  

What drives that is the mental thinking that an HT sending a signal out to a repeater will somehow get its owners voice out to the world in crystal clear audio REGARDLESS OF THE SURROUNDINGS & TERRAIN & that's just simply not true.  Even D-STAR users can't make claims to the contrary (Though ya gotta give 'em credit for trying)

Cheers & 73

Pat Cook, KB0OXD
Englewood, CO
WEBSITE | TWITTER ME |

LIVE STREAMING WEBCAM

CLICK HERE FOR OTHER HAMS WITH LIVE STREAMING WEBCAMS

--

You actually HIT the repeater??  NO WONDER THE THING IS ALWAYS DOWN WHENEVER I WANNA USE IT!!! 

Ohh...I get it now.  When you say you Hit the repeater, you mean you are Talking To Other Hams Through

It !!!  *DOH!*

[WU0R]

Don't really care about the "experimenters" out there, just ask they keep the bandwidth of the signal legal and not hog up the QSOs on either side of theirs when the other QSOs are many khz away, getting swamped with excessively wide audio. 

I don't much care for that scenario any more then some lid running an amp with the mic gain and compressor way out of kilt.

Keep it clean and keep it legal.  Period.