Hello mbezzler -
I have all three of those radios myself and am familiar with what you are experiencing, especially if you have never heard the THF6A before purchase. When I saw the video, I knew immediately.
Thing is, it is not a defect, and can be a bit psychological if coming down the chain from a commercial Motorola > Wouxon > tiny Kenwood.
First thing though - make sure that when you are listening to NOAA that you have it set for WIDE. If you push [menu] and scroll to #29, you can change it there even while monitoring to hear the difference. You may also want to change your am internal antenna settings to the external or bar antenna depending.
To be fair - make sure the Wouxon is also in WIDE mode listening to NOAA, otherwise you'll be giving it an unfair "punchy" boost in narrow.
Even if that doesn't make a huge difference for you, just consider that amateur radio audio output has never been exemplary like the Motorolas. Even so, when I heard my first Wouxon, I was blown away at how good it was compared to most amateur gear, especially from the 90's onwards, when speakers got to be about the size of your thumb! Even high-end scanners pretty much suck after hearing a moto or even a wouxon.
Guess what - if you don't like this, you won't like Kenwood's top of the line TH-D7 either. And Kenwood is regarded as the king for good audio quality.
Thing is, you'll want to pick function over sound if that is important to you since we are almost at an apples-to-oranges comparison:
Only the F6 does HF and is basically a dc-daylight rig in the palm of your hand. Pretty amazing really when you consider all the bandpass filtering that goes on just to be sure the amateur bands work ok - that being it's primary purpose. But because of the extremely small size, compromizes had to be made, and I'm amazed it doesn't just fold up and cry in my own rf-dense environment. I wish it sounded as good as a Wouxon, but alas.
The Wouxon while sounding good has really poor image rejection. Some users may not notice it, but if you are above about 480mhz, you'll get swamped by images if T-Band uhf comms are active in your area. Kind of disappointing when unlike the dc-daylight F6, this one only has to cover basically the common vhf and uhf bands. You've noted the simple S-meter. It also makes a pretty poor scanner with no nuisance-delete either. Still, I own two or three models and pretend that the images aren't there.
Basically what I'm saying here is that before you get too disappointed with the Kenwood, see if the functions are more important than the audio. For example, I think I'd rather have the Kenwood with me than the Motorola for a bug-out bag or day in the park where my monitoring interests are all over the place. And oh yeah, neither the Wouxon or Moto does airband am monitoring (118-136mhz) - one of my prime interests!
But I would totally understand if you returned the Kenwood due to the audio - it isn't a defect, they just aren't designed for sound the way the Motorolas or even amateur radios from decades past used to be. Then again, in decades past, good sounding handheld radios tended to be huge "bricks" which would pull your pants down in a minute.
