HAH! Who could forget Artie Windjammer? Funny how I forgot the other half of channel 21, the guy across Raritan Bay in Keansburg, NJ with the "Val yan tay". Artie showed me the reason why he ran the desk at half power, at full power the supply flagged and he sounded like mud. The extra 3dB simply wasn't worth listening to crap audio and as you heard he was one who knew how to put out POWAH without sounding like garbage and splattering all over the place. He didn't know how to set up a good antenna system though, transmit from atop the apartment building, receive from a lower roof down by the courtyard. Why not T&R with the same one high up with a Dow Key relay I have no idea, that's why he was an alligator.

I ran a broadcast quality compressor/limiter too, a home brew copy of the business end of a Gates somethingorother, and an AGK mic still kicking around here someplace. Once in a while I attach my one and only air check where you can hear it pumping and swishing up background because I was welding galvanized pipe with my breath, it gives off deadly fumes. I never used an EQ, never needed one and always got good reports. My best guess is if you have good stuff to begin with you don't have shortcomings to make up for. <toot> <toot> OK, I wouldn't be Golden Boy if I didn't blow my own horn once in a while. (;->)

"For the record, none of this ever happened."
You don't have to play like James Earl Jones in The Hunt For Red October, the Statute of Limitations ran out long ago. Between study and experimenting back in my CB daze, all I had to learn to pass my exam were frequency limits. I was a bit worried about that but all it took was 15 minutes to get 100% and walk out with my CSCE.

If your V2 saturated in the mid-range you didn't properly de-yellowfy it. The weak link in all Johnson audio chains was the driver transformer. Change it to a phase splitter and limit the modulators to AB1 is one way, another is take the DC off the primary and you can squeeze a few more watts out of the modulators with AB2. Just take both ends of the winding off where they were and feed B+ to the driver through a 10K 10W resistor, ground the B+ end of the winding and feed the plate end from the driver plate through a 2uF 600V "Orange Drop" cap. Since they're all the same you can do the same with all the popular Johnson AM transmitters.

IMO, the only "AM" transmitters that can't be de-yellowfied are new commercial all mode rigs because the transmit and receive audio are tailored for voice 300-3000Hz with a presence rise and nothing is modifiable without hair pulling, simply not worth all the aggravation. Simply put, no sense using an EQ when it's already EQed and all you can do is louse it up. When I still lived up north with a pretty decent antenna farm I've heard "wi-fi SSB" groups with each one trying to out "hi-fi" the other and all sounding like crap. One on 20M got more complaints than the newly formed at that time "313 lid net" and the FCC got out the trench broom, bye bye hi-fi QRM. Now we get to the good part and the heart of the matter, no matter what the mode or how a signal is generated, it can be made to "sound" good if you know what you're doing and don't think like a CBer. Digital ops know why I put that in parentheses. (;->)