[Elecraft] K3 Audio reports

[Michael Sell]

New to the list, looking for some input on Audio Quality and a discovery 
made by myself and another owner.  This may be old hat, but hope to find 
out the cause.

Since buying my K3 secondhand, I have always received audio quality 
reports from "sounds like rf in your audio" to "rough sounding audio, 
especially at the peaks", or "your audio sound hollow or distorted"

I've been all over the place trying to fix this.  Grounding mods, 
ferrite filters, sold the KPA500 and got a new amp, even got rid of my 
EV RE 20 and Symetrics 528E and went with a Heil Pro 30 straight into 
the radio.  Still the same reports!

Finally got on with two other K3 owners and did some testing.  We found 
that for two of us, we had the same problem and same audio. One did 
not.  We found that for two of us the problem was solved by advancing 
the compressor setting to at least 16 with 21 being the best setting.  
The audio in both our K3's smoothed out and now sounded excellent.  
Below a 16 setting the audio issue began and progressively got worse 
down to 0.

My questions is why?  I have never been a proponent of running 
compression.  I'm doing it and since I started, I'm now getting 
excellent audio reports.  The other odd thing is that the 3rd ham in 
this test did not experience bad audio with the compressor turned down 
or off.  We are all running the same firmware version.  Could it be 
something in the set up of the ALC in the audio section or is this a 
known bug?

Thanks for listening...
73
K0COM
Mike
Bloomington, MN