so ive been on HF for about two years now, mostly 40m and 20m, and i keep getting reports that my audio is muddy or bassy and hard to copy. im running an IC-7300 into a Heil PR-40 which i figured would be set me up pretty well but apparently not. i did set the mic gain and compression in the menu but honestly i just kind of eyeballed it because the manual is not super clear on where those should land.

i did read somewhere that SSB has a fairly narrow passband and you kind of want your voice sitting in the 300hz to 2700hz range or something like that, and anything below that is just mud on the air. but i dont really know how to dial that in practically. the waterfall looks fine to me but obviously i cant hear what i sound like from the other side.

anybody been through this and figured out a good workflow for getting decent audio? does it matter where the mic is positioned relative to your mouth, like distance and angle? i feel like im overlooking something obvious here.

yeah the PR-40 is a great mic but it has a LOT of low end and if you just plug it in and run with the defaults on the 7300 it will sound exactly like you described. what you want to do is pull up the TX equalizer in the menus and start rolling off everything below maybe 200-250hz pretty aggressively, like -10dB or more at 100hz, and also tighten the upper end depending on how your voice sits. there's a thing on the 7300 called the TX bandwidth filter and you want that set somewhere around 2.4kHz wide for normal SSB, not wider.

the mic gain is probably the biggest thing people get wrong though. you want your ALC barely ticking, like just occasionally touching the top of the scale on voice peaks, not sitting there pegged. if the ALC is working hard all the time your audio is getting smashed before the compressor even does anything useful. back the gain off until it's just grazing the ALC line on loud syllables and then use the speech processor sparingly if you need the average power up. the compressor on the 7300 i usually keep around 3-5, anything higher and it starts sounding processed.

distance from the mic matters too, closer you get the more bass buildup you get from proximity effect on a cardioid like the PR-40, so try backing off like 3-4 inches and speaking across it rather than directly into it.

honestly the best thing i ever did was find someone local on a repeater who was willing to do an A/B test with me while i messed with settings in real time. you cant really know what you sound like from recordings because your own voice sounds different to you anyway, and remote SDR receivers are helpful but they're not the same as another ham with a decent radio just telling you straight up what sounds good.

also just to throw this out there, have you checked your ground situation? i had a weird hum/low rumble thing for a while that i kept blaming on mic settings and it turned out to be a ground loop between my rig and the computer i had connected for logging. had nothing to do with the microphone at all. not saying thats your problem but muddiness can come from weird sources sometimes.