[Elecraft] CESSB (was Re: Software Update for KX3)

[Jim Brown]

On 7/19/2025 5:35 PM, Wayne Burdick wrote:
> However, even 10-12 dB of clipping causes a fair amount of distortion.

Hi Wayne,

There's distortion, and there's distortion. Listening on the air for 
speech intelligibility and watching the P3 for splatter, COMP at that 
level WITH SPEECH does not produce enough distortion to matter. And the 
cutting of low frequency energy for communications systems goes back the 
earliest days of telephony and Bell Labs more than a century ago!

 From my professional work in pro audio, I can tell you that it's quite 
difficult to measure distortion resulting from dynamics signal 
processing. Loudness processing has been practiced in broadcasting since 
the '50s, and by the '70s, had gotten so extreme that if the VU meter, 
an average reading device with carefully specified ballistics, in a pop 
music station ever moved more that one dB below 0, somebody got fired! 
Multi-band signal processing, where the audio spectrum was split into 
three bands and processed separately, was widely employed. 20 dB of 
compression and limiting is typical.

73, Jim K9YC