so ive been on SSB for about a year now and i keep getting reports that my audio is either too bassy, sounds like im in a tin can, or just generally not great. im running an IC-7300 with the stock mic and i havent really touched the eq settings much beyond bumping the tx bandwidth a little. done some reading and everyone seems to have a totally different opinion on what the right settings are.

mostly doing rag chews on 40m and occasionally 20m, not contesting or anything like that. i know the 7300 has that parametric eq built in but every time i mess with it i feel like i make things worse. also not sure if my mic placement is part of the problem — im probably 6-8 inches away from it which might be too far? honestly not sure what a baseline good SSB audio setup even looks like. anyone been through this and figured out a workflow that works

mic distance is almost certainly part of it. with a dynamic mic like the HM-219 that comes with the 7300 you really want to be like 2-3 inches away, maybe even closer. too far back and you lose all the presence and the radio ends up amplifying room noise and reverb instead of your actual voice, which is probably where the tin can thing is coming from.

for the eq on the 7300 i'd honestly start by resetting everything to flat and just listening to recordings of yourself before tweaking anything. the icom does have a voice recorder built in, use it. record yourself talking normally, play it back, and then adjust from there. most people end up cutting some low mids around 200-400hz to clean up the muddiness and boosting a little around 2-3khz for presence and intelligibility. the tx bandwidth setting matters too — for rag chews something like 100-2800 or even 100-3000 is fine, you dont need to go super narrow unless the band is packed.

also make sure your ALC is behaving, if it's slamming all the way up on every syllable your audio is going to sound compressed and harsh no matter what the eq looks like.

yeah the mic distance thing is real, I went through the exact same thing last winter. what finally helped me was borrowing a friend's headset mic — just having it right next to my mouth changed everything overnight and I got way better reports. ended up buying an electret headset not long after, nothing fancy, and the difference vs the stock desk mic was pretty noticeable for casual operating.

also someone on here told me once to try listening to my own transmitted audio on a second receiver if you have one, or even a cheap SDR dongle. hearing yourself the way others hear you is kind of eye opening. you realize stuff sounds way different than what you think it sounds like from inside your own head