i was listening to art bell the other day. he was telling about a
broadcast mode that was an improved ssb technique. it greatly improves
the audio distortion problems associated with ssb. can someone shed
some
light on this for me?....

Normally , there are no real audio distortion problems
using SSB. It's the other way around...AM is prone to
phase distortion. Thats that funky distortion you often
hear on AM, between fades, etc...You don't hear that on
SSB. The "ESSB" that Art talks about is nothing like ECSS,
which is exalted carrier sideband suppression..."I think thats
the name anyway..." It is nothing more than automatic sideband
selection for AM, to reduce the effects of phase distortion. You
can do the same thing manually....Kinda inconvienient though...
ESSB is nothing more than "ham talk" for SSB that exceeds
the usual 2.4-3.0 kc bandwidth...Say 2.7 as an average width...
Both my 706, and ts-830 are about 2.7 overall... When they say
ESSB, they are referring to using a wider rf bandwidth, in order to
increase the audio bandwidth. With ssb, the rf and audio bandwidth
are the same...On AM, the audio bandwidth is half the rf bandwidth.
So you can see, for a given bandwidth, it makes more sense to run
SSB, vs AM, if you want a wider audio bandwidth. IE: If you get to hog
6 kc, with ssb, your audio bandwidth will extend to 6000 hz. With AM,
you would only get 3000 hz...Myself....I've always felt AM was a mode
that was quite inefficient... MK