Well, I listened to the samples, and I've done a whole lot of SSB on HF over the past 40 years. The codec is a huge achievement, but most SSB signals sound much

Well, I listened to the samples, and I've done a whole lot of SSB on HF over the past 40 years. The codec is a huge achievement, but most SSB signals sound much more natural. I'm not ready to say the codec is equally intelligible, but it certainly is good. I think a better metric is spectral power for equal intelligibility. Over an HF channel, given 2700 Hz bandwidth (nominal for SSB, although you can go narrower), and a given level of transmitter power, say 100W PEP on the SSB side, then take 100W PEP and whatever error-correcting modem you can come up with that fits in 2700 HZ on the digital side, what does it sound like? What is the intelligibility comparison? There are a lot of factors in play here, BER, power level, channel fading, etc. It's not clear to me that a system that is good when it works but suffers total drop outs if it loses bits is better than an analog system that suffers noise floor variations but at least gives you something.