I'd take the comments of that particular station with a grain of salt.
What was the VE7 using for a receiver? Was the noise blanker, DNR or other noise-fighting features enabled - and possibly mis-configured?
Our 980s have a relatively good noise blanker - few other rigs can extract a signal from man-made QRN as well, at least in my experiences. It's entirely possible to mis-adjust the NB Level control and make an otherwise clean-sounding station sound like garbage but this is relatively easy to verify from a glance at the controls. A late-model menu-driven rig might not be so intuitive; I know of one recent occurrence with a friend and his 7300 which resulted in this exact scenario.
The old OO program was also replete with people who IMNSHO had absolutely no business commenting on a signal's characteristics, as they had limited understanding of how their receivers worked. Fewer still had lab-quality receive measurement equipment at their disposal to properly qualify a suspected "problem".
If you have a doubt regarding your station's spectral purity and linearity, trap-display monitor scopes and HF spectrum analyzers are getting to be commodity items these days. Pretty much anyone can afford them.
73 - Fred, N8YX?
