so ive been running an old TS-480SAT for probably 6 years now and it served me pretty well, no real complaints other than the waterfall being basically nonexistent and the filtering options feeling kinda limited when the bands get crowded. anyway i finally got a decent deal on a used IC-7300 from a guy in the club who was upgrading to a 7610 and figured why not.

first thing i noticed is the touchscreen interface takes some getting used to, like i keep accidentally changing things when i just want to scroll the waterfall. probably a me problem. the real time spectrum scope though is just ridiculous compared to what i had before, i can actually see whats happening on the band instead of just spinning the dial and hoping for something.

the built in ATU is decent but seems like it gives up on some of the weirder impedances my end fed throws at it. the 480 would sometimes grunt through stuff the 7300 just flashes an error on. anyone else notice that or is it maybe a settings thing im missing. also the receive audio is noticeably different, not sure if better or just different, sounds a bit more forward in the mids if that makes any sense.

overall happy with it but curious if anyone else made a similar jump from older Kenwood stuff and what the adjustment was like

yeah the ATU thing is real, the 7300s internal tuner has a pretty narrow matching range compared to some of the older rigs. i think its something like 16.7 to 150 ohms or somewhere around there which sounds fine on paper but end feds can be all over the place depending on frequency and how the counterpoise is behaving. lot of people just run an external tuner for anything sketchy and let the internal one handle the easy stuff. LDG makes a decent one that plays nice with Icom's AH-4 control line if you want to keep it automated.

the touchscreen thing just takes a few weeks honestly, i still fat-finger the noise reduction when i mean to hit the filter button but its whatever. you get muscle memory eventually

came from a TS-590SG myself and the transition was a little weird at first because the Kenwood rx really is excellent and the 7300 just sounds different like you said, not worse just takes adjusting the settings to get it where you want. i spent a good afternoon messing with the PBT and the treble/bass on the receive audio and got it to a place i really like now. theres a bunch of youtube videos of guys going through their exact menu settings which honestly saved me a lot of time