so ive been on HF for about two years now and i keep getting reports that my audio is either too bassy, kind of muffled, or occasionally someone says i sound like im talking through a tin can. im running an IC-7300 with the stock mic and i havent really touched the EQ settings much beyond bumping the TX bandwidth up a little. i know the 7300 has all those built in tweaks but honestly the menu system kind of intimidates me and i dont want to mess things up worse than they already are.

somebody on 40m last week actually asked me if i had a cold because apparently i sounded congested. which, fair enough i guess, but i wasnt sick so clearly somethings off. ive read a bunch of conflicting stuff online about mic gain vs compression and whether you should run any TX EQ at all for SSB. some guys swear by flat response, other guys are cranking midrange boosts. i genuinely have no idea what the right answer is here and i feel like im just guessing at this point.

is there like a sensible starting point for this stuff or does it really just come down to tweaking until somebody tells you it sounds good

the tin can thing is almost always too much high frequency or the mic is too close to your mouth. with the stock HM-219 on the 7300 the first thing id do is back your mic gain down to like 50-55% and make sure your ALC is barely moving on voice peaks, like just tickling the bottom of the ALC range. a lot of people drive it too hard and the compression artifacts are what makes it sound bad.

the TX EQ on the 7300 is actually pretty approachable once you just go in and mess with it. i run a slight cut around 200hz to clean up the low end muddiness and a gentle boost somewhere around 2-2.5khz which helps with intelligibility without sounding harsh. the bass rolloff thing is real — SSB has maybe 2.4khz of bandwidth if youre lucky and all that low end energy is just wasted and kind of smears everything. speech intelligibility lives in the midrange anyway.

also check your compression setting if you have it on. the 7300 has a speech processor and if its cranked up it will absolutely make you sound congested. try turning it off entirely first and see if you get better reports before adding any back in.

yeah the stock mic thing is real, i went through the same thing. eventually just got a Heil PR-40 on a boom arm and suddenly people were commenting on how good i sounded without me doing anything else. not saying you need to spend that kind of money but the stock mics on most rigs are kind of mediocre and designed to be acceptable rather than good.

one thing nobody told me early on — your mouth distance to the mic matters a lot on SSB. closer gives you more bass from proximity effect which sounds warm on FM or in a studio but on a 2.4khz wide SSB signal it just turns into mush. id start about 6-8 inches away and talk across the mic rather than directly into it if youre getting plosives or that congested sound.