so ive been chasing decent audio on 40m SSB for a while now and honestly im not sure what's actually moving the needle vs what's just placebo. i run an IC-7300 and for the longest time i just left the mic gain and compression where they were from the factory and figured that was fine. then a few months ago i started actually listening back to recordings of my own audio and... yeah it was not great. kind of thin, a little peaky, hard to copy through QRM.

started messing with the parametric EQ in the 7300 and bumped up the low mids somewhere around 250-300hz, rolled off some of the high end above 2.5k, and pulled back the compression ratio a bit. honestly it made a noticeable difference. still not studio quality obviously but people stopped asking me to repeat myself as much.

what i'm still not sure about is the microphone itself. im using the stock HM-36 hand mic which everyone says is garbage but when i actually compare my audio to some of the guys running SM-50s or even aftermarket stuff like an Heil PR-40 the difference isnt as dramatic as i expected. maybe my ears are bad. or maybe i just havent found the right settings yet.

curious what other people have found actually helps — talking about real on-air stuff not just bench testing. like does TX bandwidth setting matter much? ive seen people say 2.8k is the sweet spot but some DX guys swear by narrower. genuinely not sure what to believe at this point.

the EQ stuff you're doing is the right move, most people ignore it completely and then wonder why their audio sounds like they're talking through a coffee can. i spent way too long blaming my microphone before i actually dug into the 7300's TX menu and realized the default settings are basically optimized for nothing in particular.

on the bandwidth question — yeah 2.8k is kind of the standard SSB passband but i've found running around 2.4k actually cuts through pileups better when conditions are rough. you lose a little of that full audio sound but honestly nobody is listening to you for the fidelity on 40m, they just want to pull your call out of the noise. if youre doing ragchewing with a good signal then sure go wider, it sounds nicer. but DX work i almost always narrow it down.

the HM-36 thing, honestly, the capsule in those is not terrible its just that the handling noise and the proximity effect are all over the place if you're not consistent with mic distance. i switched to a desk mic and my audio got noticeably more consistent just because i stopped varying my distance by 3 inches every time i keyed up. might be worth trying before spending money on a new mic.

tx bandwidth is something i think about a lot actually. ran some tests a while back logging received signal reports on pskreporter and just general on-air feedback and yeah narrower TX does seem to get through when the band is busy even if it sounds a little more AM-radio-ish to people on the other end. the trade off is real.

one thing i dont see people talk about enough is ALC behavior. if your ALC is pumping you can do everything else right and your audio is still gonna sound compressed and weird. keep an eye on that meter when you're talking — ideally it should just barely flicker on voice peaks, not be slamming up near the top the whole time. took me embarassingly long to figure that out when i first got into HF.