so ive been on HF for about two years now mostly doing digital modes but lately ive been trying to get into actually talking to people on 40m SSB and every single time i get a signal report the audio quality complaints are all over the place. too bassy, too tinny, sounds like im in a barrel, whatever. im running an IC-7300 into a Heil PR-40 which everyone said was the gold standard mic for this stuff and i still cant seem to nail it.

ive been messing with the TX bandwidth settings in the menu and the mic gain and i think at some point i just made everything worse because now i dont even have a baseline to go back to. i know the 7300 has a ton of EQ options buried in the menus and i honestly havent touched most of them because it gets overwhelming fast. is there like a sensible starting point for SSB TX audio that doesnt involve just copying someones settings off youtube and hoping for the word?

also not sure if this matters but im running the mic on a boom arm about 6 inches from my face and talking kind of across it not directly into it. maybe thats the issue i dunno

the mic placement thing is almost certainly part of your problem. with the PR-40 you really want to be talking into the front of it, not across it — it's a cardioid dynamic and it's pretty directional. six inches is also a bit far for SSB, most guys run 2-3 inches for that kind of mic. too far back and you lose presence and your radio's mic gain ends up cranked to compensate which introduces all kinds of noise and weirdness.

for the 7300 specifically, the stock TX bandwidth is actually decent but a lot of people mess with it and forget what they changed. there's a menu option to do a full reset on just the audio parameters without wiping everything else — worth looking into before you go chasing EQ settings. as a rough starting point, mic gain around 50-60%, the TX low cut filter around 100hz and high cut around 2800hz is pretty standard voice-grade SSB. you dont need to transmit a lot of low end, it just eats power and muddies things up on the receive end anyway. the speech processor is another one people leave on without realizing it — if you have that engaged without setting it up properly it'll squash your audio in a way that sounds exactly like the barrel effect you described.

yeah what he said about the speech processor is real, that thing can wreck your audio fast if you just flip it on and leave it. i did the same thing when i first got my 7300 and spent like three weeks thinking my mic was defective lol

one thing that actually helped me was finding someone local on a repeater who was willing to do a simplex HF sked just to give me honest audio reports while i tweaked things in real time. way more useful than random contacts on 40m where people are usually too polite to tell you the truth or they're dealing with their own QRM and cant really evaluate your audio properly