Ken Thomas wrote in message . ..
my DX398 has a lot of hiss through the headphones and line out.
Compare it to say, a Walkman - Sony is clear as a bell. My opinion,
and think about this for a second - any radio that has a speaker has
hiss on the line out or phones - without a speaker - like a Walkman or
IPOD, etc.. no hiss and sounds beautiful.


Must be a design problem with that particular radio. All my radio's
have both speakers and headphone jacks. Well....Let me take that back,
the drake R4 uses an outboard speaker, but it still uses a speaker
out, and also a headphone jack.
Most of mine have no real hiss at all. My older tube types probably
have the most, but it's not enough to override the audio once it's
turned up to a usable level. My newer solid state radios have very
little. At the moment, I have two radios on. A IC-706mk2g, and a
TS-830. I just did a test using the phones. I could detect no
noticable hiss whatsoever. Having a speaker will not effect whether a
radio has hiss in the audio circuit. This is a audio circuit design
problem. Probably stemming from cutting corners to make a lower price
radio. You gets whats ya pay for....Also, comparing walkmans and ipods
to a shortwave radio is kind of like apples and oranges. The walkmans
have cleaner audio designs because they are designed for music and
they know music listeners are very picky. Requires a clean, wide range
amp. The lower priced shortwave radios don't have near the quality of
audio amps the walkmans do. They recognise that most "average" users
wouldn't hear the difference anyway when listening to broadcasts that
barely even utilize half the audio spectrum a walkman does. "20-20,000
hz" or whatever...As far as your "hiss", it's likely just the results
of a fairly cheap and simple audio amp, or poor circuit layout,
decoupling, design, whatever.... Common in many portables. If they put
more money in the audio amp, they would have to cut something else to
keep the same price..IE: BFO, digital readout, or whatever. My radios
don't hiss cuz they cost quite a bit more than a dx-398, and have
better and quieter audio circuit designs. Maybe blunt, but tis the
real reason...:/ You gets whats ya pay for. MK