so ive been on HF for about two years now mostly doing CW but ive been trying to get into SSB more and every time i get signal reports the audio is described as muddy or kind of bassy and hard to copy. im running an IC-7300 into a dipole, nothing fancy, and ive tweaked the mic gain a bunch of times but cant seem to nail it down. i know the 7300 has that built in parametric EQ thing but honestly the menu system intimidates me a bit and i havent dug into it much.

is this a common thing with the stock hand mic? i've heard people say the HM-207 that ships with it is not exactly a studio mic. should i just be looking at a desk mic or is there something i can do in the radio settings first before spending money? also not sure if my ALC is set right, i see it bouncing around quite a bit when i talk.

any tips appreciated, kind of feel like im shouting into a pillow right now

yeah the stock mic on the 7300 is pretty mediocre, most people ditch it pretty quick. but before you buy anything new honestly go into the menu and pull up the TX monitor so you can actually hear yourself on the air, thats the first thing. a lot of guys dont realize how bad their audio is until they listen to it themselves.

for the ALC issue — you want that meter barely ticking, like just kissing the bottom of the ALC range when you talk loud. if its bouncing hard youre overdriving it and that will make you sound like garbage and also splatter onto adjacent freqs which nobody appreciates. back the mic gain down until the ALC is calm, then adjust from there. the parametric EQ is worth learning, i know its a pain but even just boosting the 2-3kHz range a little and rolling off some of the low end under 200Hz makes a huge difference for voice clarity. SSB bandwidth is limited anyway so you dont need all that bass rumble eating up your passband.

also are you talking too close to the mic? distance matters more than people think, like 2-3 inches is usually good, closer than that and you get proximity effect making everything boomy.

I went through the exact same thing when I started on phone. What actually helped me the most was getting someone on a local repeater or a friend on HF to give me honest audio reports while I made changes in real time. Reading about EQ settings is one thing but actually hearing the difference is another.

One thing worth mentioning — the RF speech processor on the 7300 is actually pretty decent if you use it conservatively. A lot of operators crank it way up thinking more processing equals better audio but it usually just makes you sound harsh and distorted. I keep mine around 3-4 on the meter and it helps with intelligibility without wrecking the audio quality. And yeah seconding what the other guy said about ALC, that's probably your biggest issue right now before anything else.