My favorite sound on shortwave is when the station peaks so very strongly that the AGC can't keep up and there's a brief fraction of a second of distortion every few seconds on the signal. For best results use the widest bandwidth setting, because that optimizes the experience.

There's something about genuine skywave selective fading distortion, and especially when listening over a nice wide bandwidth like 6-8 Khz or more, that says "this is real radio and you're listening to the trip it just made to get here."

Sync detectors only go on when I want to reject whine or interference from an adjacent sideband on one side. I know, I'm a very disturbed person. But there it is.