Good job, Rob.
I'd make the following recommendations:
1. Substantially change the leveler max. gain higher, to 15dB, and the leveler decay time shorter, to 100mS. If you increase that max. gain setting it eliminates the "pumping" effect you reported and, with the 100mS setting, greatly improves density.
2. Pre-EQ, CFC and post-EQ center frequencies should match across the board. Select and set your pre-EQ center frequencies first, then extend whatever you select for the pre-EQ center frequencies to the CFC and post-EQ.
The reason this is important is as follows: the pre-EQ is where you make your first selection as to which frequencies you want to keep, and which frequencies you wish to de-emphasize. These choices should also track along in the CFC and post-EQ settings.
Selecting these frequencies is probably the most important thing you can possibly do if you don't have great raw material, i.e. if you don't have a melodious radio voice (and yours is quite melodious, Rob--seriously, you should do voice work
) For those of you who sound great to start with, merely flattening the spectrum as Rob demonstrates is adequate. For those of you who, like me, will never get voice work
, spend some time finding those specific frequencies that, when removed, improve the sound of your voice, and then set them up on the pre-EQ and drop those levels as far down as you can. Obviously you probably only want to do this with about half of your available bands, maximum, as you need some control over the remaining frequency content that you do want to keep. Think about using every other band for this.
If you are doing more than just flattening spectrum, obviously the choices you make are quite subjective.
Just by way of example, here is what I have right now. Certainly yours would be different.
3. Never use COMP or CESSB (CESSB is automatically off if COMP is off). IMHO they sound terrible. The other downside of using CESSB is that it forces you to use the linear phase filters, otherwise it won't work properly. If you are not using the low latency filters you take a huge hit in transmit latency.
4. Instead of using COMP or CESSB for additional compression, use the ALC instead. Using the post-EQ gain control, allow the ALC COMP meter to reach up as high as 7-9dB on SSB, and perhaps 3-4dB on AM (or maybe even less on AM). Because the ALC uses a look-ahead, soft limiting algorithm, it acts as a second compressor-limiter on the audio, and it sounds substantially better than COMP. COMP is probably well on its way to the dustbin of history, sort of the same way NR2 has pretty much replaced NR.
I have not explored the ALC "max gain" setting yet, and I continue to use 0dB for this for now.
73,
Scott