DSDPlus - DSD V1.7 P25 audio quality revisited (again)

I admit that I have been using DSDPlus a lot lately.

DSDPlus certainly has some nice features not seen in DSD including logging, audio input scope, a rudimentary TG/RID alias display and when 'tuned' correctly, it has excellent weak signal decoding performance.

That said, I was never a fan of the decoded audio quality of DSDPlus.

Tonight I once again fired up the Airspy, SDRsharp with various scanning plugins and this time, DSD V1.7.

I set the P25 decoder to GFSK with the mg switch enabled (for some unknown reason, GFSK works best on the local P25 phase 1) and started listening. All I can say is wow, what a difference!

It really is like chalk and cheese. DSD sounds so much more natural than DSDPlus.
The audio is not over compressed like DSDPlus and the 'marble mouth' effect is much less pronounced.

Don't get me wrong, I really like DSDPlus. The developers have really done great things with the ease of use and the logging/display features. I just wish they would sort the audio quality issues out, because honestly, to my ear it doesn't sound anywhere near as good as DSD or a conventional scanner..

As an owner of the Russian ADCR25 DV receiver, I know how good P25 can sound if you do it right.

I can never get DSD to decode worth a darn, and DSD 1.7 isn't available for Windows. When it works, DSD does sound better.. but it is very unforgiving and very incomplete and scarce documentation.

KD8DVR said:

I can never get DSD to decode worth a darn

Click to expand...

Unless you are trying to monitor a problematic P25 LSM system, then the only reason you could have for DSD not decoding worth a damn is bad components / bad settings or operator error.

If you feed a crap signal / crap audio into DSDPlus, you are going to get crap out [although DSDPlus sure can work with some pretty awful audio].

DSDPlus is not to blame for your bad decode.

To get back on topic -- BoatAnchor: It's been awhile since I ran DSD. But I do recall comparing earlier versions of DSDPlus with an earlier version of DSD, and I think I did also like the audio better from DSD -- it just sounded better to my ears.

mike