Terry,

A big AMEN to everything you've said about the importance of audio quality
in DXing and receiver characteristics. This is one of the key areas in any
receiver I consider. If it doesn't provide high-grade audio out of the box,
I will look at mods for audio quality that my friend Craig at Kiwa
Electronics proposed. He first helped me out with an ICOM ICR-70 in the
1980s, and later I saw (heard!) what he could really do with audio quality
when designing equipment from the ground-up (ie, the Kiwa "MAP" unit).

The clean, low distortion audio from the SDR-1000 is one of the reasons it's
my main receiver. In a listening environment like the Pacific NW where there
is less thunderstorm static, particularly at sunrise with a Beverage antenna
at the coast, a quiet receiver can REALLY reveal the weak signals at the
noise floor.

Fortunately, the manufacturers have come a long ways with audio quality
since the days of the "wooly" JRC NRD-515 and the excessively bassy response
of the stock ICOM ICR-70. More often than not, the current rigs have far
better audio than communications receivers from the 1980s and 1990s.

Guy Atkins
Puyallup, WA
www.sdr-1000.blogspot.com


wrote in message
ups.com...
One topic often ignored, or at least often misunderstood, is the
received audio.
Simply put, the whole goal of receiving DX stations is to actually
understand
what is being said. Anything that degrades understanding degrades
reception.
SNIP