so ive been on HF for about two years now mostly doing digital but lately ive been getting into phone more and every time i get a signal report the other station says my audio sounds kind of muddy or muffled. im running an IC-7300 into a Heil PR-40 through the 8-pin mic connector and i feel like i did everything right but clearly something is off.

ive played with the TX bandwidth settings in the menu and tried different compression levels but honestly the more i tweak the worse it seems to get. right now i have the low cut at like 100hz and high cut at 2800hz which seemed reasonable based on stuff i read but maybe thats wrong? i also have ALC bouncing around pretty good when i talk which i suspect might be part of the problem.

anyone dealt with this on the 7300 specifically or just SSB audio in general, what should i actually be prioritizing here

the ALC thing is almost certainly your issue or at least a big part of it. if the ALC is working hard constantly that usually means youre driving the mic gain too hot and the radio is basically squashing your audio before it even gets transmitted cleanly. on the 7300 i keep my mic gain set so ALC barely ticks on voice peaks, not riding the meter the whole time. took me a while to actually accept that less mic gain usually sounds better not worse.

also the compression — the built in compressor on that radio can sound pretty rough if you push it. i run mine at like 3-4 max and some guys leave it off entirely for casual ragchewing. the PR-40 is a good mic but its a pretty low output element compared to something like the HM-36 so you might actually need more mic gain than you think, which sounds counterintuitive but just means you gotta find the sweet spot. try getting a friend on a nearby frequency and have them record you while you mess with settings in real time, thats honestly the only way to actually hear what youre doing

late to this but one thing nobody mentions enough — TX equalizer settings. the 7300 has a parametric EQ in the menu and the defaults are pretty flat which sounds okay but if your mic or your voice has a lot of low mid energy it can come across as muddy through a narrow SSB passband. i boosted around 2khz slightly and cut a bit around 300-400hz and people started commenting my audio sounded much cleaner. took maybe 20 minutes of back and forth with a buddy on 40m to dial it in.