If the recordings sound muddy and Allison is OK, then I think it's obvious where the problem lies. Have a look at the frequency response of the recording you made using Audacity's "plot spectrum." If there is a lot of energy below 300 Hz, that will be largely wasted energy, as most radios filter out the low end because that is where the PL tones are. Yet when you set the level of the recording (using "normalize") that energy will help determine the gain that Audacity uses, so it will rob energy from the higher frequencies that actually do pass through the repeater/radio. So it will sound extra-muddy when it goes through your repeater/radio. You should run a high pass filter on your recordings before normalizing, to fix this (see the Effect menu). A corner frequency of 100 Hz works well. With a female voice, you can use up to 300 Hz without losing any intelligibility. In a similar way, too much high frequency energy will mess up your levels too. Due to the 8 kHz sampling used internally, Asterisk will completely eliminate any energy above 4 Khz (actually it's about zero at 3.8). If you set your levels using a recording that was made at (for example) 44.1 KHz, energy between 4 and 22 Khz will be part of the level setting, but will be completely gone when it gets down-sampled to 8 kHz. So, the minus 6 dB is correct. But that level-setting needs to be done to a recording that matches the passband of what is going to be passed through the radio. Set the minus 6 AFTER fixing up the frequency response of your recording. In a related matter - there is one well-known bulletin famous for putting a big peak in their recordings at about 3.5 kHz, so their audio will sound sharper when passed through an SSB filter (I suppose). This is annoying in Asterisk, since this is right near the top of the frequency range and will tend to be distorted if exaggerated. I usually run a notch filter at 3900 Hz with a Q of 0.95 to provide a sudden fall-off in response, right at the top, when I work with one of these bulletins. Lastly - if Allison sounds muddy, that is another story. In that case, you may have your transmit pre-emphasis configured wrong - off when it should be on (in usbradio.conf). 73 Ken